Most agencies that sell a care plan built it the same way. A client asked what happens after launch, someone wrote a one-page offer with three tiers, and the plan sold better than expected. Then the work arrived: forty sites to update, backups nobody had tested, a monthly report that took a full afternoon. The plan is still a good product. The problem is that delivering it eats the hours your team was supposed to spend on paid projects.
This page is about splitting those two jobs. You keep the product: its name, its tiers, its price, its contract and every conversation with the client. We do the recurring work that sits underneath it. If you are still deciding how the offer should look, our wider guide to outsourcing WordPress work as an agency explains where white label care plans fit next to project work and one-off fixes.
The plan is yours. The labour is the part you hand over
A care plan has two halves that are easy to confuse. The first half is commercial: what you promise, how you describe it, what you charge and how you handle a client who wants more than they pay for. The second half is operational: the updates, the backups, the checks, the notes. Clients judge you on the first half and only notice the second when it goes wrong.
We only touch the operational half. We do not rename your tiers, suggest prices to your clients or appear anywhere in the client’s view of the plan. Your client signs with you, pays you and emails you. If they ask who does the work, the answer is your team, and in every sense that matters to them, it is.
If you have not yet decided what belongs in each tier, the post on designing a maintenance offer your clients will buy walks through the decisions without assuming you will outsource anything. And if you want a plain description of what a care plan normally covers from a client’s point of view, our article on what website support includes is a useful reference to send clients.
How we map your tiers to real work
Before the first site is added, we sit down with your plan document and turn each line into something a technician can do and check. “Regular updates” becomes a decision: how often, on staging or live, with which pages checked afterwards. “Security monitoring” becomes a list of what is watched and who gets the alert. “Small content changes” becomes a definition of small, so neither of us is guessing when a client sends over a new product range and calls it a quick edit.
This step is where most problems with outsourced care plans start, because the plan was written for selling, not for doing. We will point out lines that are vague, lines that promise something no one can deliver, and lines that need a client action to work, such as a backup schedule on a host the client controls. You decide what to change. We just make sure the document and the work agree.
A worked example
Say your middle tier promises “monthly updates, weekly backups, uptime alerts and up to an hour of edits.” In our notes that becomes: updates applied once a month after a fresh backup, on staging where the site has one; a check of the homepage, contact form and any checkout after each round; backups stored off the server and one restore tested on a schedule we agree; uptime alerts sent to an address you choose; and edits logged against the hour, with a note to you when a request looks larger than the allowance.
None of that changes what the client sees. It changes whether the plan can be delivered the same way on the fortieth site as on the first.
What a month looks like from your side
Once the sites are set up, a normal month is quiet for your team. We work through the routine for each site, write up what was done, and send you anything that needs a decision. Those decisions tend to be the same handful of things: a plugin that has been abandoned by its developer, a theme licence that has lapsed, a site whose host is running an old PHP version, an edit request that is really a small project.
We do not answer those questions on your behalf. We tell you what we found, what we recommend and roughly what it would involve, and you decide whether it goes to the client as an upsell, a fix you absorb inside the plan, or a note for later. That is the point where your margin is made or lost, so it stays with you.
At the end of the month you get unbranded notes per site, written so they can go straight into your own report template. If you want the reporting handled as a separate piece of work, our unbranded client reporting page explains how that is set up.
What your client experiences
From the client’s side, nothing about the arrangement is visible. They receive your emails, your reports and your invoices. When a plugin needs an update that changes how a form behaves, they hear about it from your account manager, in your words. When they log in to their dashboard, they see the plugins and settings your plan uses, with notification emails pointed at addresses you have chosen.
There is one part of this worth deciding deliberately rather than by default: user accounts. We prefer a named admin account per technician, created by you, so that you can see who did what in the activity log and remove access in one step. Some agencies prefer a single shared agency account. Either works, but a named account is easier to audit and easier to revoke.
Edits, extras and the requests that do not fit
Every care plan eventually meets the client who treats it as unlimited development. The plan says an hour of edits, the client sends a request for a new landing page and a booking form, and your account manager has to decide how to say no without sounding like they are counting minutes.
We help with the counting part. Each edit is logged with the time it took. When a request is clearly outside the allowance, we flag it before starting and give you a scope you can quote. If you approve it as extra work, we carry it out like any other job, and if it turns into a proper build, it moves into our development work for agencies rather than sitting awkwardly inside the plan.
Bugs are handled differently. If an update breaks something, or a site stops sending email, that is part of looking after the site and we fix it as such. If a client discovers a fault that has nothing to do with the plan, such as a layout problem that has been there since launch, we tell you and let you choose whether to absorb it or quote it.
Backups and who is responsible for them
Care plans almost always mention backups, and they are the line most likely to cause an argument later. Where are they stored? Who pays for the storage? Does the client also have their host’s own backups, and if so, which one do you restore from first? What happens to the backups if the client leaves your plan?
We set up backups to storage you control, test restores on the schedule you agree with us, and keep a note of where each site’s copies live. But the responsibility belongs in your client contract, not only in our notes. Our post on agreeing backup responsibility in writing covers the questions worth settling with clients before a restore is ever needed.
Adding sites, losing sites and changing tiers
Care plan rosters change every month. A client upgrades, another leaves, a new site arrives from a client you took over from another agency. For new sites, we start with a short audit before the site enters the routine: what is installed, what is out of date, what is licensed, what is already broken. That stops you promising a client a tidy plan on a site that needs a day of work first.
When a client leaves, we remove our access, hand you the last backup and notes, and stop the routine on the date you give us. When a tier changes, the work changes from the next cycle. You keep a single list of which sites are on which tier, and we work from it.
When this is not the right arrangement
If you only have a handful of sites on a plan and someone on your team enjoys the routine, keeping it in house may be simpler. Outsourcing makes the most sense once delivery is crowding out other work, or once quality starts to vary from one month to the next because the person doing it is always busy with something else.
It also does not suit agencies who would rather pass the client on entirely. If you want us to look after a client directly and you prefer a commission over running the plan, the referral route is the cleaner option. For agencies that want to grow recurring revenue under their own name, our post on building income beyond one-off projects covers the business side, and the day-to-day maintenance work we deliver page describes the routine in more technical detail.
To start, send us your current plan document, or even just the tier descriptions from your website, and a list of the sites you want covered. We will come back with questions, a note of anything in the plan that needs tightening, and an estimate for the delivery work, so you can check your numbers before any client is moved.