Someone asks for a “quick change” to their website. You say yes. Forty-five minutes later you’ve touched the nav, rewritten a heading, resized a hero image, and answered three follow-up messages. You bill nothing because it felt too small. They assume everything is always free. That cycle ends badly for both of you.

Why small jobs are the most expensive jobs

Every change request carries a fixed cost before anyone touches a line of code: reading the message, understanding context, opening the site, testing after the edit, closing the loop. That overhead is roughly the same whether the edit takes two minutes or twenty. When jobs arrive one at a time, you pay that overhead every single time.

On the client side, drip-fed requests mean their site changes in unpredictable bursts. No review. No sense of what went live and when. Mistakes slip through because nobody is looking at the whole picture.

Batching solves both problems at once.

The policy in plain terms

Here’s the structure we use for the small-business sites we build and maintain - what any individual client pays is between us and them, but the shape and the going market rate look like this.

  • One fixed fee. For a small local site with modest update needs, think in the £50–£100 a month range depending on volume - the point is that it’s flat and agreed upfront, not metered.
  • One change batch a month. The client collects their requests and sends them together, once.
  • Each batch covers about an hour’s worth of work. That’s a handful of discrete tasks: update a price, swap a photo, rewrite a paragraph, add a product.
  • Turnaround is five working days from submission of the full batch.

That’s it. No hourly rate to argue over. No invoice for twenty minutes of work. No “is this included?” back-and-forth.

What counts as one change

This is where most policies fall apart. Be specific before you sign anything.

  • Swap one image: one change.
  • Update the text in one section: one change.
  • Add one new product with photo and description: one change.
  • Change the opening hours across the whole site: one change (same edit, multiple places).
  • Redesign the homepage layout: not a change - that’s a project, scoped separately.
  • Fix a broken link: not a change - that’s a bug, handled outside the batch.

Write this list into the agreement. Ambiguity is where margin dies.

Why batching protects the client

Clients often assume batching is a restriction. Frame it correctly and they see it as a feature.

When you collect the month’s changes before submitting, you naturally review them. You spot the one that no longer matters. You notice two that contradict each other. You remember the fifth thing you actually needed. The site gets better, more considered updates - not a stream of reactive tweaks that leave it inconsistent.

It also creates a rhythm. The client knows roughly when changes go live. They can plan around it - a seasonal promotion, a new product range, a price update ahead of a busy period. Predictability has real value.

What sits outside the policy

Be equally clear about what the flat fee does not cover, or you’ll spend the year arguing.

  • Hosting and domain renewal (billed at cost, separately).
  • Security updates and plugin maintenance (include these in the fee or call them out explicitly - don’t leave them in a grey area).
  • New pages, new features, new integrations - these are quoted as projects.
  • Emergency fixes if the site goes down - define whether that’s included or billed at an agreed hourly rate.

One paragraph in the agreement covering these four points saves hours of awkward conversation later.

How to run the numbers for your own situation

Take a typical client. Estimate how many change requests they actually send in a year. Multiply by your honest overhead per request - including the back-and-forth, not just the edit time. Compare that to what you’re currently charging.

If the overhead number is bigger than the revenue number, you’re subsidising their maintenance. A flat fee with batched submissions turns that into a predictable, margin-positive relationship.

The lower end of that range suits a small local retailer with modest update needs. A busier site - more products, more frequent promotions - warrants a higher fee or bigger batches. The structure scales; the exact number is a conversation, not a rule.

One honest caveat

This model works when the relationship is already good. If a client is difficult or scope-creepy by nature, a flat fee gives them a target to push against. In that case, hourly with a written brief per task is cleaner, even if it feels less elegant.

Know your client before you pick your structure.

The structure flexes to fit the organisation too. We look after the site for SWAS, a community for South Asian social workers and allied professionals, on a lighter arrangement - fewer, bigger batches across the year. Same batching rules, different rhythm. The policy is the constant; the details bend to the relationship.

If you want to talk through how a maintenance policy might work for your site or your agency, see how we structure ongoing work and drop us a line from there.