How to price a maintenance plan

Price a maintenance plan from your own numbers. Define what is covered, estimate delivery hours and their variation from past work, then add your internal hourly cost, tools and provider costs, allocated overhead and a contingency to reach a monthly cost baseline. Margin, tax treatment and the customer price are separate decisions. There is no universal rate, so validate the price with customer research and revisit it with delivery evidence.

Define what maintenance includes

Describe covered work, cadence, response expectations and exclusions. Use examples for urgent requests, replacement work and scope changes that need separate agreement.

Estimate effort and capacity honestly

Use past work to estimate ongoing effort and variation between customers. Account for onboarding, busy periods and the capacity needed to meet the service promise.

Choose a structure customers can compare

A single tier, a few levels or a custom arrangement can work when each option differs in a concrete service outcome or boundary. Validate the price through your own economics and customer research.

Revisit with delivery evidence

Plan enrollment, service delivery, additional work and plan changes. Review customer feedback, actual effort and exceptions to see whether the original scope and pricing assumptions still hold.

A hypothetical price check

Suppose you are considering Care Plus at $190/month, a hypothetical price. Fill in the worksheet with your own hours and costs. If your monthly cost baseline is above $190, that price does not cover your modelled costs. If it is below, you have room to decide your margin, and tax treatment remains a separate question.

Build a monthly cost baseline

Fill in your actual delivery assumptions. This is a planning worksheet, not a market price recommendation.

Monthly delivery hours
your estimate
Internal cost per hour
your cost basis
Allocated tools and provider costs
your account terms
Allocated overhead
your method
Contingency
your chosen assumption

(delivery hours × internal hourly cost) + tools/provider costs + allocated overhead + chosen contingency = monthly cost baseline

If useful, divide the baseline by your expected number of active plans to estimate a per-plan cost. Decide separately how your business sets margin, tax treatment, and customer price.

A hypothetical price check

Hypothetical example, no cost figures stated

Suppose you are considering Care Plus at $190/month, a hypothetical price. Fill in the worksheet with your own hours and costs. If your monthly cost baseline is above $190, that price does not cover your modelled costs. If it is below, you have room to decide your margin, and tax treatment remains a separate question.

Three common pricing mistakes

  1. Pricing from a competitor's price

    Another provider's price says nothing about your hours, tools or overhead. Start from your own baseline.

  2. Leaving out time outside the visible task

    Onboarding, communication, reviews and exceptions take time that a monthly task list does not show. Estimate them separately.

  3. Offering open-ended scope at a fixed price

    With a fixed monthly price and unlimited requests, the baseline stops being reliable. Name the cap, the exclusions and the price for extra work.

Turn the estimate into a package

Once the baseline is clear, decide what each package includes, its price and billing period, and what stays outside it. Write the exclusions and the price for extra work next to the price, so the customer can compare plans without guessing.

How Komashi fits

In Komashi each package carries its own price and billing period, and add-ons can be recurring or one-time. You set the numbers; any price Komashi AI suggests is a starting point for you to review.

Set up maintenance plan pricing

What to check before you launch

  • Covered work, cadence, response expectations and exclusions are written down.
  • The cost baseline uses your own hours, rates and overhead.
  • Each option differs in a concrete service outcome or boundary.
  • A review date is set to compare scope and price with actual effort.

Ready to put this into practice?

Create a service with Komashi.