Website care plan costs in the UK: custom, Next.js and AI-built sites

A website care plan in the UK costs anywhere from £25 a month with a freelancer to £1,500 or more for a revenue-critical platform under a proper agreement. Kyln's plans sit at £175, £350 and £750 a month, published in full below. This guide sets out what the UK market advertises as of July 2026, what each price band should include, and where the standard advice quietly stops applying: sites that are not WordPress. One declared interest up front — Kyln sells care plans. The numbers are here anyway, next to everyone else's, so you can judge both.

The short answer

The ranges are wide because "maintenance" means different work on different stacks, and because advertised prices hide different exclusions. Both problems are unpacked below.

What a care plan actually covers

Strip the packaging and a care plan is six jobs: keep the site up (hosting, SSL, DNS), keep copies (backups someone has actually restored), keep it patched (security and software updates), watch it (uptime and error monitoring), change it (a block of edits or fixes each month), and answer (a named route to a human, with a stated response time). Every plan on the market is some subset of those six at some response speed. When you compare prices, compare which of the six are included and how fast the answer comes. That is the whole product.

What UK providers advertise

Checked July 2026. Nearly every published price list is written for WordPress, which matters more than it first appears — the next section is about that.

Advertised prices are "from" prices. A £50 plan typically covers updates and backups on one WordPress site, with hosting billed separately and anything past half an hour of edits invoiced on top. None of that is dishonest, but it means two £100 plans can end up £600 apart once hosting, edits and incident fees land. Ask what the invoice looks like in a bad month, not a good one.

Why custom, Next.js and AI-built sites are different

Search for website maintenance pricing and almost every guide, including the ones the ranges above come from, is describing WordPress work: plugin updates, PHP version bumps, theme conflicts, malware scans. That is the right work for WordPress, and irrelevant for a site built on a modern framework.

A custom or Next.js site has no plugins to update. It has dependencies with security advisories, framework versions that reach end-of-life, a build pipeline that can quietly rot until the site cannot be changed at all, serverless functions, environment configuration, and third-party APIs that deprecate things on their own schedule. The maintenance is real; it is engineering rather than button-clicking. Which changes who can sell it to you: the person on the other end of the plan has to be able to read the code, because on a custom site a "small content edit" is often a component change shipped through a preview deploy.

AI-built sites and apps add one more layer: nobody has read the code. Tools like Lovable, Bolt and v0 ship working products with no tests, secrets in odd places and database policies nobody chose. Putting a generic maintenance plan on top keeps the lights on while the risks stay exactly where they are. Our order of operations for anything AI-built with real users: a review first, from £1,500, then care around what the review fixed — otherwise the plan is paying someone to babysit unknowns.

Kyln's care plans, in full

Our own numbers, so the market table has something concrete to stand against. Every price is public, and the same list is on the pricing page.

What is deliberately not in the fee: humans awake at 3am (monitoring runs round the clock; support response is tiered and honest about its hours), new features (work beyond the included fixes is quoted, or billed at £650 a day), and platform bills (hosting and email pass through at cost rather than marked up). Product and platform builds, meaning apps with payments, accounts or integrations, carry a bigger surface and start at £1,250 a month. Ownership stays with you throughout: the site, the code and the domain. Care is something you choose to keep, not a lock-in.

What moves the price

• What breakage costs you. A site that takes bookings or payments prices downtime differently from one that is effectively a business card. Care follows the stakes.
• Integrations. Every third party wired in (payments, CRM, calendars, email) is something that can change underneath you and need attention on its schedule, not yours.
• How often it changes. Weekly content and campaign edits justify a bigger included block; a yearly refresh does not.
• Compliance. Audit trails, retention rules and security questionnaires add recurring work, not just setup work.
• The state of the code. Tests, monitoring and a clean deploy pipeline make a site cheap to care for. An unreviewed AI build makes it expensive, or uninsurable until reviewed.

Do you need a care plan at all?

Honestly: not always. A five-page brochure site that changes once a year can get by on decent hosting, automatic backups and a calendar reminder for renewals. What a plan buys at that size is having it handled rather than remembered — and if that is not worth £175 a month to you, better to know now than mid-contract.

Three situations change the answer. The site earns money or takes bookings: silent breakage now has a price per day. The site is custom-built: the cheap "WordPress fixes" market cannot help you, and re-hiring the original developer for each small change is slower and dearer than a plan. Or the product is AI-built with real users: start with a review, fix what it finds, then put care around the result. The free readiness scorecard is the two-minute version of that first step.

Common questions

How much should I pay for website maintenance in the UK?

For a WordPress brochure site, advertised plans run £25 to £300 a month depending on how much support and how many edits are included. For custom, Next.js or AI-built sites, realistic budgets start around £150 to £300 a month and rise with the revenue at stake; plans under £100 rarely include anyone who can read the code. Kyln's plans are £175, £350 and £750 a month, published in full.

What should a website care plan include?

Six things: hosting oversight, backups that have been restore-tested, security and dependency updates, uptime and error monitoring, a monthly block of edits or fixes, and a named support route with a stated response time. If a plan is vague on any of the six, ask; the gaps are where surprise invoices live.

Can you take over a site someone else built?

Yes, and it is common: hand-built, agency-built, or AI-built with Lovable, Bolt or v0. Custom sites usually start with a short technical read. AI-built apps with real users start with a proper review, from £1,500, because nobody has read that code yet — how we decide between salvage, refactor and rebuild.

Is hosting included, or extra?

Both models exist in the market, and a "from" price usually means extra. Kyln's plans include the management of hosting, SSL and backups; the underlying platform bills, hosting and email, are passed through at cost rather than marked up inside the fee.

Am I locked in?

You shouldn't be, anywhere. With Kyln you own the site, the code and the domain, and care is month to month. Any provider that keeps the domain or the repository in their own name has built a lock, and it is fair to ask why.

What does care for a Next.js site involve that WordPress care doesn't?

Dependency and framework updates instead of plugin updates, a build pipeline that has to keep working, serverless and environment configuration, error tracking on the application itself, and support from someone who can ship a code change through a preview deploy. The jobs rhyme; the skill set doesn't.

Plans and inclusions live on the Kyln Care page, build and care pricing together on the pricing page, and if what you have is an AI-built app rather than a site, start at the rescue hub.