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 used for Walk On The Wild Side Reptiles & Aquatics in Ashford - a small independent retailer whose site we built and now maintain.

  • £250 a year. One fixed annual fee, paid upfront.
  • Four change batches included. One per quarter, roughly.
  • Each batch covers up to four changes. A change is one discrete task: update a price, swap a photo, rewrite a paragraph, add a product.
  • Changes are submitted together, not drip-fed. The client collects them, then sends one message.
  • Turnaround is five working days from submission of the full batch.

Thats 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 four 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 annual 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 - dont 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 annual fee with batched submissions turns that into a predictable, margin-positive relationship.

The £250 figure works for a small local retailer with modest update needs. A busier site - more products, more frequent promotions - warrants a higher fee or more batches per year. The structure scales; the number is a starting point, 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.

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.