Andy Stratton, WordPress developer, WordCamp Baltimore organizer and Fells Point resident, launched WP Maintainer earlier this month, a new service that delivers WordPress site maintenance—updates, back-ups, security optimization—and on-demand support from a small team of four WordPress developers living in and around Baltimore.
Over e-mail Stratton said he and his team are “attempting a new business model in a market that truly needs support and education.” The whole effort is bootstrapped, which makes sense for developers who are paid per project. (Stratton is also the brain behind Sizeable Interactive, a WordPress cooperative in town, from which Maintainer’s developers are drawn.)
What differentiates Maintainer from other, similar WordPress maintenance services—like maintainn, founded this year, and ManageWP, based in Virginia, among others—is the “human attention to detail,” Stratton said.
Indeed, at first glance, what WP Maintainer offers is fairly comprehensive:
- All WordPress core, theme and plugin updates by a WordPress professional
- Compatibility support for when you update your version of WordPress and, womp, your theme no longer works
- WordPress site backups (scheduled on-site or off-site)
- An hour of additional developer support time each month for custom tasks
- Free Sucuri security monitoring and malware cleanup
- Free site security/functionality audit
- Free migration to any of our hosting partners or an approved hosting provider
- One monthly fee, cancel at any time
Watch a video about WP Maintainer:
[vimeo 56388841 w=550 h=277]
Introducing WP Maintainer. from WP Maintainer on Vimeo.
Of course, while the best things in life are free, many other things are not. Perhaps the most important difference between Stratton’s new service and comparable services is the pricing structure. Sites like maintainn offer tiered pricing beginning at $25 per month. WP Maintainer offers one package starting at $249 per month.
As WordPress users ourselves, Technically Baltimore has focused more on keeping maintenance in-house, and there are cheaper a la carte options for some of the more valuable offerings —daily backups, for instance—in addition to some of the lower tier options, which focus on automation.
But there’s the rub.
Each Maintainer developer, including Stratton, charges freelance rates of $150 to $200 an hour. Stratton said WP Maintainer’s pricing model is based off a two-hour retainer even though the services being provided take 10 or more hours a month. In other words, it’s primo bang for the buck, with real people on call whenever your WordPress site starts acting ornery.
“The personal relationship, quality of support and time with a developer is the differentiator,” said Stratton. “It’s either right for someone or it’s not.”
More features will be added over time, but soon to come is an affiliate program that will “include well known sites like WooThemes and CSS-Tricks.com,” said Stratton.
