The $49 plan is a plugin updater with a support inbox.

This is not that. A retainer here buys position: you are answered first, scheduled first, and worked on by someone who already has your environment mapped, your credentials on file, and your last three incidents in memory.

It does not buy repair labor. Repairs are always quoted separately. Anyone selling unlimited fixes for a flat monthly fee is either capping the work invisibly or losing money on you until they stop answering.

Three tiers

Standby

$597 /mo

One site. For the owner who cannot afford a bad week but does not break things often.

Answered inside 4 business hours
Preferred scheduling ahead of all non retained work
Environment fully documented and retained on file
Credentials and access held ready, no scramble at 9 PM
Monthly health check with a written report
10% off every quoted repair

Start Standby

Sentry

$997 /mo

Up to three sites, or one network to five subsites. For the operator whose revenue stops the minute the site does.

Answered inside 1 business hour
First claim on one of the two daily emergency slots
No double rate after 4 PM, evenings bill at standard
Biweekly health checks, core and plugin update strategy
Quarterly stability review with the next 90 days planned
15% off every quoted repair

Start Sentry

Shield

$1,997 /mo

Up to five sites, or one network to ten subsites. For the business that wants an in house WordPress architect without the salary.

Answered inside 30 minutes during dispatch hours
A daily emergency slot held for you, not competed for
No double rate at all, evenings and Saturdays at standard
Direct line, no form, no queue
Weekly health checks and a staged update pipeline
Multisite and WPMU networks fully supported
Subsites past ten quoted individually
20% off every quoted repair

Start Shield

Repairs, rebuilds, and new development are quoted separately at your tier discount. One Saturday incident on Sentry or Shield returns most of the month’s fee in avoided double rate. Retainer terms are enumerated on the Legal page.

Retainer clients run my platform. Full stop.

I can promise a 30 minute response because I am not walking into a stranger’s mess every time. Retained clients run one stack, the one I can enter and exit at speed, at 6 AM, from a phone, without guessing. Cloudflare, Kinsta, Kadence. Full stop. No exceptions, no grandfathering, no “but our host is fine.”

Not on it yet? That is a normal starting point and I move you. Migration is a fixed price project, done once, and the retainer starts the day it lands.

Required, free

Cloudflare

DNS, edge cache, WAF, bot filtering. I hold no affiliate relationship with Cloudflare. I require it because it stops the attacks I would otherwise bill you to clean up.

Required host

Kinsta

Automatic daily backups, one click restore, real staging, and a support desk that answers at 2 AM. Rollback in four minutes is the entire reason my guarantee is possible. Affiliate link, disclosed.

Required theme

Kadence

One theme, one block system, one set of failure modes I know cold. No builder soup, no forty plugin stack, no mystery shortcodes from a developer who vanished in 2019. Affiliate link, disclosed.

Getting there

Platform Migration, $1,497 flat

One site moved onto the stack and left stable: Kinsta provisioning and transfer, Cloudflare DNS cutover and WAF rules, SSL, mail and deliverability verified, plugin audit with the dead weight removed, and a documented rollback point before anything changes. Quoted at $1,497 flat for a standard site. Theme conversion to Kadence is quoted separately after I see what you are on, and a build carrying heavy custom work is quoted, not guessed at.

Migration is a prerequisite for the retainer, not an upsell attached to it. You are welcome to migrate and never retain me. The stack is better than what you are on either way.

What I do not take on retainer.

WooCommerce. Stores are a full time discipline with payment gateways, tax engines, and inventory sync. I do not take store retainers, and I will tell you honestly that you need a WooCommerce specialist, not me.
Headless builds and anything where WordPress is only an API behind someone else’s front end.
Sites on shared hosting, or any host that cannot produce a restore point on demand.
Sites where another developer also has write access and no change log exists.
Membership, LMS, or booking platforms carrying live transactions. Ask and I will refer you to someone who does that work daily.

Saying no to store work is why the response times above are real. A specialist who takes everything is just a generalist with a longer queue.

Twenty plugins. That is the line.

Every retained site carries a cap of 20 active plugins. A multisite network carries a cap of 20 distinct plugins across the whole network. Cloudflare, Kinsta’s own tooling, Kadence, and must-use plugins do not count against it.

This is not tidiness. Plugin conflicts do not add up, they multiply. Twenty plugins is a hundred and ninety possible interactions between them, forty is seven hundred and eighty, and that is the arithmetic behind most of the 2 AM calls I get paid to answer. A promised 30 minute response is only honest on a stack that can be reasoned about in 30 minutes.

Plugins 21 to 25: $25 per plugin, per month, added to your tier.
Plugins 26 to 30: $50 per plugin, per month. The risk is not linear, so the price is not either.
31 or more: not accepted on retainer until a Plugin Reduction Audit is done. $997 flat, and it usually pays for itself in what comes off the site.

Plugin counts are taken at onboarding and reviewed at every health check. How overage is counted and billed is enumerated on the Legal page.

Two retainer seats open.

Capacity is two emergency engagements a day. Retained clients hold first claim on both, so the number of seats is finite by arithmetic, not by marketing.

Ask about a seat Payments and terms