Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Looking after your website
For anybody being asked for a monthly fee Every figure here includes GST

A website is not something you buy. It is something that goes out of date.

Nothing on a website breaks on a particular Tuesday. It just drifts — the price is the one you were quoting in 2024, the hours are wrong over Christmas, the new service is on the van and in your head and nowhere else. None of that stops anything working, and all of it reads to a stranger as a business that has quietly stopped paying attention. So when somebody asks you for a monthly fee to look after it, the honest question is not whether the fee is fair. It is which jobs it covers, how often each one comes round, and which of them you would be better off doing yourself.

The twelve jobs Skip to the eight you should keep
Jobs on the listTwelve
Ones you should keepEight of them
Your own time, monthlyAbout twenty minutes
What a plan is really forThe four that fail silently
01 / THE TWELVE JOBS

What "looking after
a website" actually
consists of, itemised,
with the intervals.

Maintenance is a word people pay for without ever being shown the list. Here is the list. Twelve jobs, how often each one comes round, and what it costs you when nobody does it. Read it once and you will be able to tell, from any proposal, which of the twelve are in it and which are not — which is the only way to compare two monthly fees that are both described as looking after your website.

01
The silent one

Proving the enquiry form still delivers

Send yourself one, from your own phone, and watch it arrive. Forms stop for ordinary reasons — an email address that changed, a mailbox that filled up, a spam filter that got stricter, a certificate that lapsed at the host — and not one of those announces itself.

How oftenOnce a month, and on the day anything about the site or the email changes. If nobody does itSomebody chose you, took the trouble to write, and you never heard. From where you sit it looks exactly like nobody being interested, which is why this one runs for months.
02
The one that costs a job

Today's hours, including the awkward days

Regular hours are easy. It is Waitangi Day, Easter, the week between Christmas and New Year and the afternoon you shut early that go wrong, and they have to be right in two places at once — on the site and on the Google profile.

How oftenBefore every public holiday, and whenever the week changes shape. If nobody does itThe site says open, the phone rings out, and that is the last you hear from that person. People take "closed" at its word and do not ring twice.
03
The awkward conversation

The prices on the page

If you publish a callout fee, an hourly rate or a starting price, it has a shelf life. The number on the page is the one you were quoting the year before last, because putting a new one up was a ten-minute job that never had a deadline.

How oftenThe same week the price changes, which for most businesses is once or twice a year. If nobody does itEvery call opens with you explaining the difference before anybody has described the job, and you start the conversation sounding either dearer or less organised than you are.
04
The one off the website

Keeping the Google profile fed

Not part of your website, and for a local business usually doing more of the selling than the site is. It wants photographs, hours, services, posts and answers to the questions people ask on it, and it notices when it stops getting them.

How oftenMonthly is plenty. Twice a year is not. If nobody does itA profile that has stopped being fed looks abandoned beside one that has not, and the one beside you belongs to a competitor. It is also the half of your presence most people see instead of the site.
05
The one that compounds

Reviews asked for, and answered

Something about reviews — too few, too old, or answered badly — is the most common reason people give for not ringing a local business at all, and it beats price by a distance. It is also the only item on this list that cannot be bought.

How oftenAt the end of every finished job, which is the only moment it works. If nobody does itEvery job you finish without asking is one you do not get back. Nothing else here accumulates like this, in either direction.
06
The invisible work

New services and new areas put up

The work you started taking last winter. The suburb you now drive to. It is real, it is being done, and the website still describes the business you were running two years ago, which is the version search engines are still showing people.

How oftenAs it happens, rather than in a catch-up next winter. If nobody does itThe people searching for exactly that job, in exactly that place, never find you doing it — and you never see the enquiry you did not get, so nothing tells you it is costing anything.
07
The dated one

Photographs replaced

The van has been resprayed, somebody has left, somebody has started, and the most recent job on there is from the year before last. Your own phone has better photographs on it this week than the ones currently doing the selling.

How oftenA few times a year, and it takes about ninety seconds a photograph. If nobody does itNothing breaks. The site just reads as older than the business, and photographs are the first thing anybody actually looks at.
08
Fails silently

The certificate that makes the padlock

The thing that keeps the address on https and the browser quiet. It renews itself automatically almost everywhere, right up until the automatic renewal stops working, which happens for dull reasons nobody is watching for.

How oftenNothing to do while it works. Somebody has to notice the week it does not. If nobody does itThe browser puts a full-page warning in front of your website, and nobody rings to tell you. The form in row 01 usually stops at the same moment.
09
Fails silently

The platform and the pieces underneath it

Whatever the site is built on, and whatever plugs into it, keeps moving. Updates arrive, something that worked last month stops agreeing with something else, and a page or a form quietly stops behaving the way it did.

How oftenMonthly, and checked after rather than assumed to have gone fine. If nobody does itIt does not fall over. It degrades, in one corner at a time, and the day you find out is the day a customer tells you — or the day row 01 has been failing for a quarter.
10
Fails silently

A backup somebody has actually restored

Most hosting takes backups. Far fewer people have ever put one back, and an untested backup is a belief rather than a backup. The test is the whole job: restore it somewhere harmless and look at what comes out.

How oftenTaken continuously, proved at least a few times a year. If nobody does itYou find out what the backups were worth on the one day it matters, and the answer arrives too late to do anything about.
11
Fails silently

Somebody to ring when it is down

Not a job so much as an arrangement. The site is off on a Saturday morning, or the email has stopped, and the question is whether there is a number that gets answered and somebody who already knows how the thing is put together.

How oftenAlmost never, and then urgently. If nobody does itYou spend a weekend finding out who hosts your own website. The person who built it has a new job, the login is on a laptop that died, and the outage lasts as long as the search does.
12
The one that decides the rest

Logins that still work, in your name

Open each one — the domain, the hosting, the site itself, the Google profile, the email — and prove you can still get in. It takes a quarter of an hour and it is the only job on this list that makes the other eleven possible.

How oftenOnce a year, and the week anybody involved in the site changes. If nobody does itEvery free fix below assumes you can make a change. If you cannot get in, somebody else has already decided what your options are. That is a page of its own.

Eight of those twelve are twenty minutes of your own time a month and need nobody. Four of them — rows 08 to 11 — are the ones that fail without telling anybody, and they are the actual argument for paying somebody. That is the division the rest of this page is built on, and it is in that order on purpose: the eight you should keep come first.

02 / THE EIGHT THAT ARE YOURS

Twenty minutes
a month, and you have
done most of it
yourself.

Eight of the twelve jobs are yours, and they are the eight that decide whether the website reads as a business paying attention. None of them is technical and none of them needs a plan. What they need is a trigger, because a job with no deadline does not get done — so here they are as a routine, attached to things that already happen: the start of a month, a public holiday, the end of a job.

First of the month

Send yourself an enquiry

Fill in your own form from your own phone, with your own name in it, and wait for it to turn up. If it does not arrive in a couple of minutes, check the junk folder and then ring whoever looks after the site. This is sixty seconds and it is the single most valuable minute on this page — a form that quietly stopped is the only fault here that costs you a customer who had already decided.

First of the month

Put three photographs on the Google profile

Off your phone, from jobs you have actually done, and it takes about ninety seconds each. The van, the job before, the job after, the two of you. It keeps the half of your presence most people see looking like somebody is there, and it is the one piece of this whole list that is genuinely better done by you than by anybody you could pay, because you are the one standing in front of the work.

Before every public holiday

Fix the hours in both places

On the site and on the Google profile, and they have to agree. Waitangi Day, Easter, Christmas, the afternoon you are shutting early for a tangi or a school thing. Google lets you set special hours in advance, so this can be done once in January for the whole year if you would rather never think about it again. If you are not sure, say what is true: closed, or ring to check.

End of every job

Ask for the review while you are still parked outside

Not that evening and not next week. A short message with a link that opens straight on the review box, sent while the work is in front of them. That is the whole method and it costs nothing. It is also the only job on the list that compounds, which is why it is worth building into packing up rather than leaving to a mood. The full routine is written out here, including what to do about a bad one.

The week it changes

Prices, services and areas, as they happen

If you have put a price up, put it up on the site the same week. If you have started taking a kind of work, or started driving somewhere you did not, that belongs on the site while you still remember it is new. This is the job most often left for a quiet month, and a quiet month is exactly when the business can least afford to be describing itself as it was two years ago.

Once a year

Open every login and prove it still works

The domain, the hosting or platform, the site itself, the Google profile, the email. Not "I think I have that somewhere" — actually log in, and write down where each one lives. Fifteen minutes, once a year, and it is what makes everything else on this page possible. Do it in a week when nothing is wrong, because the week something is wrong is a much worse week to find out.

That is six triggers covering eight of the twelve jobs, it is about twenty minutes a month, and it is worth more than most redesigns. If you do nothing else from this page, do the first tile. Section 03 is the four that are left — the ones that fail without telling anybody, which are a different kind of problem and the only honest reason to pay somebody monthly.

03 / THE FOUR THAT FAIL SILENTLY

Four jobs with
no trigger, and
nobody watching
for them.

The eight above have a moment attached to them — a month turns over, a holiday arrives, a job finishes. These four have nothing. Nothing on your phone tells you a certificate has lapsed or a backup has been silently failing since March, and by the time anything visible happens it has usually been going on for a while. That difference is the whole case for paying somebody, and it is a case about four jobs rather than twelve.

No trigger fires

The certificate, and the week the automatic renewal stops

It renews itself almost everywhere and then one day it does not, usually because something changed underneath it — a host moved, a setting was edited, a payment method expired. There is no email you will read and no symptom until the browser decides to put a warning in front of the whole site.

Why it is different: every one of the eight jobs above is something you would notice yourself if you looked. This one you cannot notice by looking at your own site, because your own browser has usually cached its way around it for days.

No trigger fires

Updates to the platform and the pieces plugged into it

Software underneath the site keeps moving whether anybody is paying attention or not. Updates are mostly uneventful, and the uneventful ones are the problem: they go in, something small stops agreeing with something else, and nothing announces it.

Why it is different: the job is not applying the update, which is a button. It is looking at the site afterwards, with the form in row 01 included in the look, and knowing what it looked like before. That is a habit rather than a task, which is exactly what does not survive a busy month.

No trigger fires

Backups that have been put back at least once

Taking a backup is automatic and nearly universal. Restoring one is neither, and a backup nobody has ever restored is a belief about a file. The failure mode is quiet in both directions: the backup silently stops, or it keeps running and quietly captures something broken.

Why it is different: this is the only job on the list where doing it badly looks exactly like doing it well, from the outside, for years. The test is the job, and nobody tests a backup in a week when nothing is wrong unless it is somebody's actual responsibility.

No trigger fires

Somebody who already knows how it is put together

The least technical of the four and the one people feel the most. The site is off on a Saturday, or the email has stopped arriving, and what decides how long it lasts is whether there is a number to ring and somebody at the end of it who does not have to work out your setup from scratch first.

Why it is different: you cannot do this one yourself by definition, and it is worth nothing at all on the day you arrange it. It is worth something on one unpredictable morning, which is the same shape as insurance and should be priced in your head the same way.

Four jobs. That is the honest size of what a monthly fee is for, and if somebody is charging you for looking after a website, those four plus the hosting are what you are actually buying — everything else on the list you could do in twenty minutes with your own phone. Which is why the next section is seven questions rather than a price: the fee is not the thing to judge, the list behind it is. Ask us the seven as readily as anybody else.

04 / SEVEN QUESTIONS

Seven questions
for whoever is
charging you
every month.

Put these to the person you are paying now, or to the person about to quote you, or to us. They are all answerable in a sentence by anybody who has written their list down, and the useful part is not any single answer — it is that a plan with nothing behind it cannot get through all seven without saying "I would have to check". Keep it friendly. Most of these get a straight answer the same afternoon.

  1. Question 1

    What is the fee made of, line by line?

    Hosting, the domain, the certificate, the updates, the edits, the profile, the reporting — which of those are in it and which are extra. Ask for it as a list rather than as a sentence. Anybody who cannot produce the list has not got one, and you are buying a word rather than a service.

  2. Question 2

    What does "unlimited edits" exclude, and how fast is fast?

    Unlimited almost always means text and photographs rather than new pages, new features or a rebuild, and that is a perfectly reasonable line — it just needs saying out loud before you need it. Then ask for the turnaround in hours or days, and whether it is a number or a hope.

  3. Question 3

    Whose name is the hosting account in?

    Yours, or theirs with you billed on? Both are ordinary and only one of them means you can hand the site to somebody else without anybody's permission. The same question applies to the domain, and it is the one most worth having an answer to in writing.

  4. Question 4

    What happens to the site the month I stop paying?

    Does it stay up, go off, or sit in a holding page? Is there an exit fee, a notice period, or a charge to hand over logins? Ask while everybody is getting along, because the answer is the single biggest difference between two plans at the same price.

  5. Question 5

    Are the backups taken, or taken and tested?

    Everybody takes them. Ask when one was last restored, and where to. If the answer is that the host does it, that is not nothing, but it is a different answer from somebody having put one back and looked at the result. You are allowed to ask to see it done.

  6. Question 6

    Who answers on a Saturday, and on what number?

    Not a guarantee — a name and a number. Whether that is a person, a ticket form or an inbox nobody reads until Monday is most of what you are paying for in row 11, so it is worth knowing before the Saturday rather than during it.

  7. Question 7

    Can I see the report you would send me, before I sign?

    Ask for last month's, with somebody else's details taken off. A plain page saying what was done and whether it was a good month is worth having. Forty pages of charts out of a dashboard is a thing being sent to you rather than a thing being done for you.

  8. No remedy

    The plan that was only ever a hosting bill

    This is the version that quietly costs real money, and it is almost never anybody being dishonest. A monthly fee got set up years ago to cover hosting, nobody ever wrote down what else it included, and so nothing else was ever included. Both sides have forgotten. The tell is question 1: if the list cannot be produced, there was never a list, and you have been paying for a service nobody agreed on. Ask for it in writing, once, kindly — most of these end with a plan that genuinely starts doing something.

Doing nothing is a real option

If your site is a few honest pages that rarely change, the eight jobs in section 02 plus hosting may genuinely be the whole of it. Plenty of businesses are better off there, and we would rather say so now than have you work it out in a year.

Do not stop paying to force an answer

It is the first thing people think of and it is the one move that can turn a tidy-up into a real loss — a lapsed domain can be taken by somebody else, and an unpaid invoice changes the conversation. Settle up and ask separately.

A plan is not marketing

Keeping a site current and getting more enquiries are two different jobs with two different prices. If a maintenance fee is being sold to you on the promise of more work or a position on Google, that is a different product and nobody can honestly promise either.

Ask us the same seven

Section 05 answers all of them about us, in the same order, including the two that are least flattering. If an answer there is worse than the one you are getting now, stay where you are — that is a sensible outcome and we would rather you reached it from this page than from a phone call.

05 / OURS

The same seven
questions, answered
about us.

In order. The fee covers hosting, the domain and the certificates on one bill, the four silent jobs in section 03, the small changes you text through, and a monthly look at the Google profile. Unlimited edits means text and photographs, done inside 48 hours, and excludes new pages, new features and rebuilds, which get quoted like any other job. The hosting account and the domain are in your name. If you stop paying, the site stays yours and nothing is charged to hand anything over, because you already hold every login. Backups are taken continuously and restored and checked rather than assumed. The Saturday number is 022 584 0585 and it is Josh. And the report is one page in plain English with a sentence at the top saying whether it was a good month — ask and we will show you one before you sign anything.

Doing it yourself

Section 02 every month, plus hosting and the domain from whoever you like. We will tell you this is the right answer when it is, and it is the right answer more often than anybody in this trade admits — particularly for a small site that rarely changes. Nothing to pay us, nothing to cancel, and no follow-up in the spring to check whether you have changed your mind.

$0and the honest answer for a lot of people

Care plan

Hosting, domain and certificates on one bill with no logins for you to keep track of. Unlimited small edits, texted through and done inside 48 hours. A monthly Google Business Profile tune-up, and a hand asking your customers for reviews. Security, backups and updates checked rather than assumed. A one-page report in plain English. The site kept in step with the business as it changes rather than in a rush next winter.

$169per month, or $1,690 a year — two months free

Google Business Profile setup

Relevant here because row 04 is half of what goes stale and the profile is where most people see you. Claimed, verified, in your name, with the categories, service areas, hours, photographs and review link done properly, and a routine you can work from the van. Registered to you rather than to us, and yours whether or not you ever build a site with us.

$395one-off, no website needed

A website, if you need one

Three tiers, four to eight pages and up. The first thing built is your real homepage, before any money moves, so what you are judging is the site rather than a promise about one. The care plan is optional on every one of them and saying no to it changes nothing about what you own.

$2,450to $5,950, three tiers

Every figure on this page includes GST and nothing is added at the end. There is no term on the plan, no exit fee and no notice period. The founding price takes $500 off any website, for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a discount, and we do not discount off-menu. Full pricing, tier by tier, and how to read anybody's quote.

06 / STRAIGHT UP

The awkward
questions about
our own position.

You sell a monthly plan and most of this page talks me out of it. It does, and here is the arithmetic rather than a virtue. A plan sold to somebody who did not need it gets cancelled, and in the meantime it produces a customer who tells people the money was wasted. A plan taken by somebody who genuinely cannot keep the four silent jobs running gets kept for years. The second kind is the entire business, and the only way to find those is to describe the first kind out loud. We would rather have eight honest plans than twenty resented ones.

So is the free option real, or is it a way of getting the phone to ring? Partly the second, plainly — this page exists because somebody searching for whether to pay monthly is a person with a website and a budget. The free option is also real: section 02 is the whole routine, nothing in it is withheld, and if you work it yourself and never ring us we have lost nothing we had. The point of writing down the part you can do yourself is that it is the only part of this list anybody can check us on.

What if I take the plan and never text you anything? Then the four jobs in section 03 are still being done, which is most of what you are paying for, and you have a hosting bill with somebody watching it. If a month goes by where genuinely nothing happened, the report will say so in those words rather than being padded out to look busy. And if several months go by like that, we will say the plan is not earning its keep for you, because a fee nobody can see the point of gets cancelled eventually anyway and we would rather be the ones who raised it.

And the part we cannot dress up. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, so nothing on this page is a story about a site we have been looking after for six years. There are no testimonials on this site because there are none to print, and the builds in the portfolio are invented businesses, labelled as such on every page of them. What is written above is how the work is structured and what it costs, not a count of how many times we have done it. The first ten clients get $500 off for helping with the not-having-any problem, in exchange for a review, a testimonial and permission to publish the build.

07 / QUESTIONS

Six from people
already paying
somebody monthly.

Is a maintenance plan actually necessary, or is it just hosting with a word in front of it?

Both exist, which is why section 04 is seven questions rather than an answer. A plan doing the four jobs in section 03 is doing work you cannot practically do yourself and would not notice the absence of until something stopped. A plan that is a hosting invoice with "maintenance" written on it is a hosting invoice, and the way to tell them apart is question 1: ask for the list.

If the list comes back and it is short, that is still useful — you now know what you are buying and can decide whether it is worth the money. Most of these conversations end with a plan that starts doing more rather than with somebody leaving.

My website has not changed in three years and nothing has gone wrong. Why would I start paying?

You might not need to. If the site is a few pages that are still accurate, you can read your own prices and hours on it today, and you can get into it to make a change, then the eight jobs in section 02 plus hosting may be the whole of it. That is a real answer and it is the first row in our own price list.

The two things worth checking before you settle on it: send yourself an enquiry from the form, and prove you can still log in. Those are the two failures that look exactly like nothing having gone wrong.

Can I pay somebody only when something needs doing?

For edits, yes, and plenty of people work that way perfectly happily — you ring, it gets quoted, it gets done. What does not work on that basis is the four silent jobs, because nobody rings about a thing they have not noticed. An hourly arrangement covers the work you can see and leaves exactly the work you cannot see undone.

So the honest shape is either a plan, or the section 02 routine done by you with somebody on call for repairs. What we would avoid is paying a monthly fee that is really an hourly arrangement with a minimum.

Will keeping the site updated get me higher up Google?

We are not going to tell you that, and anybody who does is guessing with your money. What is true and much duller: an abandoned Google profile looks abandoned, out-of-date hours and prices lose people who did find you, and a form that is not delivering loses people who had already chosen you. Those are leaks rather than positions.

There is no promise of a ranking or a number of enquiries anywhere on this site and there is not going to be one. We would have to be able to prove it before we said it, and nobody outside Google can.

Can you look after a site somebody else built?

Usually, and we will say plainly when the answer is no — some sites are built on a platform the original studio controls, where nobody else can be given the access the job needs. The first thing either way is section 01 row 12: find out whose name the accounts are in, because that decides what is possible before anything else does.

If we can take it on, the plan is the same price and the same list. If we cannot, you will be told why in a sentence rather than quoted a rebuild you did not ask about.

What happens to my site if I cancel the plan?

Nothing, except that nobody is looking after it. The site, the domain and the content are in your name from the first day rather than the last, so there is nothing for us to hand over that you are not already holding. No exit fee, no notice period, no month of us looking into it.

You would want to take over the hosting bill and the section 02 routine, and we will walk you through both on the way out. Who owns your website sets out the five accounts a site actually consists of and what to check in each — it is the question to ask of any plan, ours included, before you sign one.

ALSO WRITTEN

Three places to
go from here.

One if row 12 is where this page stopped being possible, one if the site is live and quiet rather than out of date, and one if you have decided the real answer is a new site rather than a plan.

If you cannot get in

The five accounts, and whose name each one is in.

A website is a domain, a DNS record, a hosting account, the site itself and a Google listing, routinely held by different people. Six checks you can do tonight without asking anybody, and what to do if one comes back wrong.

 If it is quiet

Five stages, and a website is only the last two.

Out of date is one problem; silent is another. Five checks you can run tonight on your own phone to find which stage is losing people, and the four things you will be told it is that it usually is not.

 If it is a rebuild

What one costs, and the running costs no quote includes.

Two honest quotes can be four thousand dollars apart. The decisions that move the number, the ongoing costs that are left out of build prices, and eight questions to put to anybody quoting you — this studio included.
08 / ASK

Send us the address.
We will tell you
which of the twelve
are not happening.

No charge and no obligation, because it takes about twenty minutes and it is the same twenty minutes described above. You will get back which of the twelve jobs look like they have stopped, which of them are yours to do in section 02, and whether a plan is worth it for a site like yours — including, where it is the truth, that it is not and you should keep your money. If you are already paying somebody, send the fee as well and we will tell you honestly whether it looks like the list or like a hosting bill.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz Both doors, including the secondThe plan, on the homepage

Josh reads these himself. There is no salesperson, no sequence of emails afterwards, and asking whether you need a plan does not put you on a list.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. No spam, no obligation, no sales sequence. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.