Website Maintenance Cost in India: What You'll Actually Pay

For most Indian businesses, website maintenance cost in India lands between ₹1,500 and ₹25,000 per month - roughly ₹18,000 to ₹3 lakh per year - depending on whether you run a small brochure site, a lead-generation marketing site, or a transactional platform with logins and payments. A simple WordPress site sits at the lower end; a custom Next.js app or e-commerce store sits at the higher end.

What exactly are you paying for?

"Maintenance" is a vague word that hides very different work, so quotes vary wildly. At its core, maintaining a website means keeping it online, secure, fast, and current. That breaks into a few buckets: infrastructure (domain, hosting, SSL, email), security (updates, patches, malware monitoring, backups), upkeep (plugin and framework updates, broken-link fixes, bug fixes), content (text edits, new pages, image swaps, blog publishing), and improvement (small design tweaks, performance tuning, conversion fixes). When one agency quotes ₹2,000/month and another ₹15,000/month, they are almost always scoping different buckets - not one being a rip-off.

Before comparing prices, decide which buckets you actually need. A static company site needs little beyond security and the occasional content edit. A site that drives revenue - bookings, orders, enquiries - needs active monitoring and steady improvement, because every hour it is slow or down costs you real money.

What does website maintenance cost in India per month?

Here are honest monthly and annual ranges we see across Delhi NCR and India for solid, production-grade upkeep - not the cheapest quote you can find on a marketplace. These assume the agency actually does the work each month, not just "we are here if something breaks."

Site type	Monthly (INR)	Annual (INR)	What it typically covers
Basic brochure / WordPress site	₹1,500 - ₹4,000	₹18,000 - ₹48,000	Updates, backups, security patches, a few content edits
Marketing / lead-gen site	₹4,000 - ₹10,000	₹48,000 - ₹1.2 lakh	Above plus uptime monitoring, performance checks, landing-page tweaks
E-commerce store	₹8,000 - ₹18,000	₹96,000 - ₹2.16 lakh	Catalogue updates, payment/gateway upkeep, security hardening, priority fixes
Custom web app / platform	₹12,000 - ₹25,000+	₹1.44 lakh - ₹3 lakh+	Framework upgrades, server management, monitoring, feature maintenance

A useful rule of thumb: budget 15-20% of your original build cost per year for maintenance. If a website cost ₹3 lakh to build, plan ₹45,000-60,000 a year to keep it healthy. Skipping this is the single most common reason NCR businesses end up with a hacked, broken, or embarrassingly outdated site within 18 months.

What's actually inside an AMC?

Most agencies in India sell maintenance as an Annual Maintenance Contract (AMC) - a fixed yearly fee, sometimes billed monthly. A genuine AMC should spell out, in writing, exactly what is included. A reasonable AMC covers: regular backups (and tested restores, not just backups that nobody has ever checked), security updates for the CMS, plugins, and server, uptime monitoring with an agreed response time if the site goes down, bug fixes, a set number of content-update hours per month, and a basic monthly or quarterly performance report.

What it usually does not include - and what trips people up - is new feature development, a redesign, large new sections, SEO campaigns, or paid-ad management. Those are billed separately. Before signing, ask three questions: How many support hours are included each month and do unused hours roll over? What is the guaranteed response time if the site is down? Who owns the code, domain, and hosting account if you leave? An AMC that dodges these is a red flag.

How much does hosting really cost - AWS vs shared?

Hosting is the line item people most often get wrong, in both directions. Cheap shared hosting feels like a bargain until your site slows to a crawl during a sale or campaign; over-provisioned cloud feels "professional" but can quietly burn cash a small site never needed. Here is the honest comparison.

Option	Typical annual cost (INR)	Best for	Trade-off
Shared hosting	₹3,000 - ₹8,000	Small brochure / low-traffic sites	Slower, noisy neighbours, limited scaling
Managed WordPress / VPS	₹8,000 - ₹30,000	Growing marketing sites, small stores	More cost, some technical management needed
Cloud (AWS / similar)	₹15,000 - ₹1 lakh+	High-traffic stores, custom apps, scale	Needs proper setup; costs scale with usage

For most growing businesses, modern managed cloud is worth it: it stays fast under traffic spikes, scales automatically, and keeps Core Web Vitals healthy - which matters because over 70% of Indian traffic is on mobile, often on patchy networks, and Google ranks slow pages lower. We build and host our own clients on AWS for exactly these reasons. If your current host can't handle a festive-season rush or a viral post, that is not a maintenance problem, it is a hosting problem - and our website optimization service usually starts by fixing it before touching anything else.

DIY, freelancer, or agency retainer - which is cheapest?

The right answer depends on how much your website earns, not just what each option costs. DIY looks free, but it costs your time and is one missed update away from a security breach. It works for a true side-project or a brand-new venture testing the water; it is risky once the site generates revenue. A freelancer on an ad-hoc basis is cheap per task (₹500-2,000 an hour) but offers no monitoring and no guaranteed response - fine for occasional edits, dangerous if your store goes down on a Sunday.

An agency retainer or AMC costs more upfront but bundles monitoring, guaranteed response times, security, and a team that already knows your codebase. For any site tied to revenue, this is almost always the lowest total cost once you price in downtime, lost leads, and the day a DIY-managed site gets hacked. The break-even is simple: if a day of downtime costs you more than a month of maintenance, you should be on a retainer.

The costs people forget to budget

Beyond the monthly fee, a few recurring costs catch business owners off guard. The domain renews at ₹800-1,500 a year, and letting it lapse can mean losing it entirely. Professional email (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365) runs roughly ₹125-₹900 per user per month. Paid plugins, themes, or APIs often carry annual licence renewals. And an SSL certificate is usually free now, but some setups still bill for it. A trustworthy quote lists these openly; be wary of anyone who pretends a website is "build once, forget forever."

How to choose the right plan for your business

Match the plan to what the site does for you. If it is a digital business card, a basic AMC plus reliable hosting is enough. If it is your main lead engine or a store, pay for active monitoring, fast response, and steady improvement - that spend pays for itself in uptime and conversions. And before you renew with whoever built the site, get one honest second opinion on what your site actually needs. If you would like a clear, itemised maintenance quote for your specific site, you can tell us about it here and we will map it to the ranges above. For businesses planning a rebuild, our custom web development and SEO, AEO & GEO teams bake maintainability and performance in from day one, so the ongoing cost stays predictable.

FAQs

Is website maintenance really necessary, or is it just an upsell?

It is necessary for any site you depend on. Software, plugins, and frameworks receive security patches constantly; an unmaintained site is a soft target for hackers and tends to break with browser and platform updates. The question is not whether to maintain, but how much active work your specific site needs.

What's the difference between hosting cost and maintenance cost?

Hosting is the server space that keeps your site online - a fixed annual cost (₹3,000 to ₹1 lakh+ depending on the stack). Maintenance is the human work of updating, securing, fixing, and improving the site. You pay for both; many agencies bundle hosting into the AMC, but always ask which line items are included.

Can I pay only when something breaks instead of a monthly fee?

You can, on an ad-hoc basis with a freelancer or agency, typically ₹500-2,000 an hour. It saves money on a low-stakes site but offers no monitoring, no backups, and no guaranteed response time - so if a revenue-generating site goes down, you may lose far more than the fee you saved.

How much should I budget for maintenance on a new website?

A safe planning figure is 15-20% of the build cost per year. For a ₹3 lakh website, that is roughly ₹45,000-60,000 annually, or ₹4,000-5,000 a month - covering security, backups, hosting, and a reasonable amount of content and bug-fix work.