The sentence that was costing me money
"Hey, quick favor — can you check why the site is down?"
I used to answer it for free. Then one month I counted: 11 favors, 6 hours, $0. Meanwhile the same clients were paying $29/month for hosting and a SaaS uptime tool that emailed them a red number they didn't understand. They had a budget for tools. I just hadn't given them anything to buy from me.
So I packaged the favors.
The care plan, exactly as I sell it
$97/month "Care Plan" — solo operator edition:
- Uptime + expiry watch. External monitor on their site and API. Cert expiry checked 14 days out. I get the alert, they get a one-line human summary: "Back up at 2:14, cause was X, prevented next time by Y."
- Monthly 15-minute health call. Disk, backups (with an actual restore test), error rates, slow queries. One page summary. Not a meeting — a receipt.
- 1 hour of changes included. Small edits, deploys, config fixes. Roll over up to 2 hours. This is the part that makes it feel like a bargain, because everyone has some change they've been putting off.
- The 3 a.m. rule. If it goes down, I'm the one who knows before they do, and fix time counts toward the included hour.
Costs me about 40 minutes a month per client once the monitors exist. The monitors are the leverage — you build them once, sell the watching.
The part nobody tells you: the pitch is the artifact
I don't pitch "ongoing support" (a cost). I pitch "nobody on your side has to think about this" (an outcome). The first call: I run the free failure check — what happens if you don't touch the site for 48 hours, when did the cert last get checked, has anyone ever restored a backup. Almost every small site fails all three. That's not a scare tactic, that's the punchline: you already have the problem, I'm offering the fix.
Close rate from "quick favor" clients to care plan: about 70%. They already trust me — I've been doing the work for free, I just hadn't put a price on it.
What I actually use to deliver it
- A one-page runbook per client site — what it is, how to check it's alive, how to restart it. This is 90% of what the "health call" reviews, and it's the thing clients can't believe they don't have.
- Cron + heartbeat guards — the silent-failure patterns (backup succeeded into a dead bucket, cron exited 0 while doing nothing). These are the findings that justify the plan every single month.
- External uptime + cert expiry, never monitoring-inside-the-dying-box.
I've been packaging those pieces for people who'd rather skip the trial-and-error — pre-written runbook templates, the guard scripts, the failure checklists:
- Ops Starter Kit — monitoring + runbook framework for tiny teams (use code LAUNCH50 for 50% off)
- Automation Starter Pack — cron/heartbeat/backup guard patterns with exact commands
- Agent Ops 24/7 — running autonomous ops without a staff
The math that makes it obvious
Three care-plan clients at $97 = $291/month of recurring revenue for ~2 hours of mostly-automated work. Five clients is a $485/month floor that exists whether or not you land a project this month. Ten is a business. The tools cost $0-29/month. The only real ingredient is: stop answering the favor for free.
Pick your three most recent "quick favors." Price them at $97/month. Send the invoice. The worst case is you keep the client and lose the favor. The best case is you're not available for favors anymore.
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