Anticode Open builder

Running a website maintenance retainer clients keep paying for

A retainer fails in one of two ways: the client stops seeing what they pay for, or the work quietly grows past the fee. Both are fixed by the same thing, a fixed monthly routine with a visible report. Here's a routine for small-business sites on Anticode, what the platform already does without you, and what you should actually be charging for.

Updated · By the Anticode team

Be honest about what the platform already covers

Traditional care plans charge for plugin updates, server patching and backups. On Anticode much of that isn't your job. Design-engine pages ship as plain HTML and CSS with no scripts, so there are no plugins to update. The last ten published versions are backed up, and file hashes recorded at publish are checked by a scan that reaches each site about once a day. Each site also serves a security report at /.well-known/anticode-security, worked out from the published pages.

Don't sell those as your labour. Sell the part that needs a person: someone who reads the enquiries pipeline, keeps the content true, makes the changes and explains what happened. Clients value that more once it's named.

A monthly scope that holds

Edits
A fixed number of small changes per month, such as new prices, opening hours, a team member, a seasonal banner. Define small: anything that takes a sentence to describe and doesn't add a page.
Forms check
Send a test enquiry through each form and confirm it reaches the client's inbox or channel.
Content check
Read the pages most likely to drift: prices, hours, staff, offers, legal pages.
Analytics read
Page views per day by source, and what changed since last month.
Report
One page, sent the same day each month.
Out of scope
New pages, redesigns, campaigns and new features, quoted separately.

The monthly routine, in order

  1. Collect the month's requests from your inbox in one list. Clients send changes as they think of them; batch them unless they're urgent.
  2. Make the edits. Most are a change request in a sentence, or a direct text edit in the visual editor. Repeating content such as menus and team lists is quicker as CMS collections the client can also edit.
  3. Check each change in the preview on a phone width, run the release checklist, then publish.
  4. Test every form with a real submission. Each submission goes to a connector once with no retries, so a broken connector shows up only if someone tests it.
  5. Read the analytics. Anticode counts views without cookies, by source, and lists AI assistants' referrals as a source of their own. Note any big change and its likely cause.
  6. Write version notes. List the changes with the date; history keeps the versions, your notes say why they were made.
  7. Send the report.

What the report should say

Keep it to things the client can act on. What changed on the site this month and why. How many enquiries arrived and whether they all reached someone. Visits compared with last month, with the top sources, and one plain sentence of interpretation ("visits from search rose after the new services page went live"). Anything you recommend for next month, with a price if it's outside the retainer. The Intelligence page can help here: it answers questions only from cited metrics and makes forecasts only after 14 days of data, so quote it rather than guessing. A longer template is in the monthly website report workflow.

Running several retainers from one place

With more than a handful of clients, a Team or Agency workspace keeps every site in one dashboard, with your team as admins or members. Remember that connectors are set for the whole workspace, so route each client's enquiries by site name through a webhook rather than connecting one client's channel directly. More on that in managing multiple client websites.

What goes wrong

  • Scope creep. "Can you just add a page for the new service?" Keep a running list of out-of-scope requests and quote them in the report.
  • Invisible work. A month with no changes still needs a report, or the client wonders what they paid for.
  • Rolled-over edits. Decide upfront whether unused edits carry over. Most retainers say no.

Limits

Anticode doesn't invoice clients, track your hours or produce the client report. It provides the analytics, submissions, version history, backups and checks you report on. Pricing is yours; for the plan the sites run on, see pricing.

Questions people ask

What should a website maintenance retainer include?

A fixed number of small edits, a monthly test of every form, a check of content that drifts, a read of analytics and a short report. New pages and redesigns are quoted separately.

Do Anticode sites need security updates?

Not plugin or server updates in the usual sense. Design-engine pages have no scripts, and publishing runs the server's security checks. Content and forms still need a person to check them.

Can the client make small edits themselves?

Yes, if they have a seat in the workspace or the site is in their own account. Many retainers let clients edit CMS entries such as menus, and keep layout changes for you.