What a Monthly Website Fee Should Contain
A monthly website fee survives when the client can see what it bought. It gets cancelled when they cannot, and it gets cancelled in the month money is tight, which is the month you needed it. Here is what to put in the email.
Most small shops have tried a maintenance plan. Most have also had the conversation where a client asks, politely, what exactly they have been paying for.
That question is not an attack. It is a reasonable request that arrives because nothing ever showed up unprompted, so the fee became invisible, and invisible things look like waste.
Why the usual answer fails
The common answer is a list of activity. Updates applied, backups taken, uptime monitored, security patched.
All true, all necessary, all completely uninteresting to the person paying. It describes your inputs rather than their outcome, and it quietly invites the follow up question. How long does that actually take you?
Once the conversation is about your hours, you have already lost it. A fee defended by effort is a fee being audited.
Four things worth sending
Keep the email short. One screen, four parts, same shape every month so it becomes familiar.
- Which pages people landed on. Not total visits. The actual pages, because a business owner recognises their own services and will immediately have opinions.
- Which questions brought them there. The real phrases people typed. This is usually the part clients forward to a colleague, because it tells them something about their own market.
- What changed since last month. With the direction marked clearly. Up, down or flat, stated in the graphic, so nobody has to do the subtraction.
- One recommended next move. One. Not a list of six. A single suggestion with the reason attached, which turns the report into advice.
That last item is what makes the fee a service. The first three are information. The fourth is why they are paying a person instead of installing a plugin.
The number to keep separate
This matters more as AI crawlers get busier.
A crawler visit proves a bot read the page. It does not prove a person did. Those are two genuinely different facts and a report that blends them is a claim you will have to walk back one day.
Both are worth reporting. Say which is which. Something as plain as this works.
Eleven people found this page through search last month. Separately, AI crawlers requested it forty times, which tells us the page is being read by software but does not tell us anyone acted on it.
Clients trust that sentence more than a bigger number with no caveat, because it sounds like somebody who knows the difference.
What the fee should not promise
Three traps, all of them easy to fall into while trying to justify a price.
Do not promise rankings. You do not control the ranking and you will spend the whole year explaining a thing that was never yours.
Do not promise unlimited small changes. The word unlimited means something different to each of you, and the gap shows up as resentment rather than as a conversation.
Do not promise a response time you can only meet on a good week. One business day that you always hit beats two hours that you usually hit, because the second one trains the client to check up on you.
Pricing it so it survives
Work out roughly what an hour of your attention is worth, add the time the report takes once it is routine, and price slightly above that.
Low enough that the client does not think about it. High enough that you do not resent it. A fee you resent gets delivered badly, which is how it ends up cancelled anyway.
And attach it to every new build from now on rather than trying to add it to old relationships. Adding a fee to an existing client is a negotiation. Including it in a proposal is just the price.
Why this is a platform question
All of the above assumes you can get the data without a fight.
If your reporting comes from three connected accounts owned by three other companies, you are renting your reporting as well as your platform, and your report is only as deep as whatever those connectors expose.
A platform that keeps the data itself can answer questions a connector cannot, like which pages a crawler read last Tuesday. That is the gap between a dashboard screenshot and something a client reads twice.
Related reading: how you deliver client sites covers where the report fits in the month, the retainer and monthly recurring revenue entries cover the vocabulary, and the agency operating platforms category lists the reporting tools worth comparing.