Modelled at five, twenty and fifty sites
Agency WordPress Upkeep: Hire In-House or Resell White Label
Decide whether your agency hires for WordPress upkeep or resells someone else's, modelled at five, twenty and fifty client sites. Salary, recruitment, cover during leave and the margin each route returns per site per month. The calculator runs your own numbers instead of an industry average, and the crossover sits further out than most agencies expect.
Hiring in-house for WordPress maintenance costs a salary plus recruitment, tooling and cover, and pays back above roughly fifty client sites. Below that, white-label reselling returns more margin per site with no fixed cost and no cover problem.
What will this cost me?
Second and further sites are 20% off. Excludes the cost of one bad release.
30-day money-back guarantee · No setup fee · Cancel anytime
How the options compare
| Factor | In-house hire | White label reseller |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed monthly cost | Salary plus overhead | None |
| Cost per site | Falls as sites are added | Flat per site |
| Cover during leave and illness | Yours to arrange | Included |
| Out-of-hours cover for an outage | Needs a second hire | Included |
| Time to start | Weeks of recruitment | Days |
| Scaling down | Redundancy | Cancel the sites |
| Margin at 5 sites | Negative | 40-60% |
| Margin at 50 sites | Higher, given full utilisation | 40-60% |
A volume question wearing a strategy costume
Agencies debate this as a philosophical matter – control, quality, owning the client relationship. It is arithmetic.
An in-house hire is a fixed monthly cost that does not care how many sites it covers. White labelling is a variable cost that scales exactly with the portfolio. Those two lines cross at a specific number, and the only question is where you sit relative to it.
Everything else – control, quality, response – is available on both routes with the right arrangement.
The number most models leave out
In-house calculations usually compare one salary against the wholesale cost of the current portfolio, and conclude that hiring wins earlier than it does.
What gets omitted is cover. One person is unavailable for several weeks a year and asleep for a third of every day. An agency selling any out-of-hours response with a single in-house hire is selling something it cannot supply, and closing that gap means a second person.
Include recruitment, tooling, management time and cover, and the crossover moves out substantially – typically past fifty sites rather than the twenty most models produce.
What most agencies end up doing
The pure versions of this decision are rare in practice.
What works at thirty to fifty sites is a split: the maintenance baseline is bought wholesale, and the client-specific work – the development, the design, the relationship – stays in-house. The predictable half is outsourced and the differentiated half is kept.
It also removes the worst outcome, which is hiring against projected growth and carrying a salary while the portfolio catches up.
What to judge it on
- How many sites are under management today?Not the target - today. The crossover is a volume question and everything else follows from the current number.
- Is the work continuous or lumpy?Maintenance is continuous; a salary is fixed. An agency with fifteen sites has real maintenance work and not enough to fill a role, which is the awkward middle this decision lives in.
- Who covers holidays and illness?One in-house person has the same coverage gap as any freelancer. Genuine cover means a second hire, which moves the crossover considerably further out.
- Do you want to sell out-of-hours response?Selling something you cannot supply overnight without a rota is where in-house maintenance quietly becomes two hires.
- What is the cost of getting it wrong on a client site?An in-house mistake is yours. A reseller mistake is contractual, and that difference is worth real money on a portfolio you did not build.
The short answer
- Resell itBelow roughly thirty sites. No fixed cost, no cover problem, margin from the first site, and the ability to stop without redundancy. This is where most agencies sit and where most of them over-plan.
- HireAbove roughly fifty sites with steady growth, where the role is genuinely full and out-of-hours cover justifies a second person. The per-site cost then falls below any wholesale rate.
- The awkward middleThirty to fifty. Resell the baseline and keep the client-specific work in-house. It is the pragmatic answer and it is what most agencies actually do once they stop modelling extremes.
Plans that include this
- Starter$39/monthor $390 a year — two months freeBlogs, portfolios and brochure sites
- UpdatesMonthly
- BackupsWeekly, 30-day retention
- Uptime5-minute checks
- Malware removalNot included
- Most chosenProfessional$79/monthor $790 a year — two months freeSmall businesses and lead-generation sites
- UpdatesWeekly + PHP version management
- BackupsDaily, 60-day retention
- Uptime1-minute checks
- Malware removalIncluded
- Business$149/monthor $1490 a year — two months freeStores, membership sites, anywhere downtime costs money
- UpdatesWeekly, tested on staging first
- BackupsDaily, 90-day, multi-location
- Uptime1-minute + 2-hour restore
- Malware removalIncluded
Questions people ask before calling
When does hiring beat white labelling?
Around fifty sites under management with steady growth, assuming the role is full and cover is arranged. Below that the fixed cost outruns the per-site saving, and the crossover moves further out once a second person is needed for out-of-hours.
What margin does white-label maintenance return?
Typically 40 to 60 per cent, flat, at any volume. The predictability is the point: it does not improve with scale and it does not collapse when a client leaves.
Do clients need to know?
No. White-label work is delivered under your brand with your reporting. What matters is that the scope you sell matches the scope you buy, because the gap between them is yours to absorb.
What is the hidden cost of hiring?
Cover. One person cannot provide continuous response, so selling anything out-of-hours means a rota, which means a second hire. That is the number most in-house models leave out.
When it needs handing over
white label wordpress maintenance serviceResell WordPress maintenance under your own brand and keep the margin. Put your client count and your retail price into the calculator below against our wholesale…
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