Ask five web agencies in Kenya what website maintenance costs and you will get five different answers, and not small differences either. Some quote a couple thousand shillings a month. Others quote well over a hundred thousand. A few quietly mean per year when they say "monthly," which is its own kind of problem. If you have come away from that research more confused than when you started, you are not missing something obvious, the market genuinely has not settled on a straight answer.
Here is the honest version, without the mixed units.
Why the Same Service Gets Quoted So Differently
Most Kenyan providers price maintenance in tiers based on the type of website you have: a basic brochure site, a small business site, a corporate site, an e-commerce store. The logic makes sense in theory, a bigger site needs more attention, but in practice it means two businesses with nearly identical needs can land in different tiers depending entirely on how a provider chose to define "corporate" versus "small business." Add in providers who quote annual totals without labelling them clearly as annual, and it becomes genuinely difficult to compare one quote against another.
What Realistic Monthly Maintenance Actually Costs
Stripped of the confusing tier names, ongoing website maintenance in the Kenyan market realistically lands somewhere between Ksh 5,000 and Ksh 30,000 a month for most small to mid-sized business sites, moving higher for e-commerce stores or anything with frequent content changes. Below that range, you are usually looking at a very limited plan, updates only, no content changes. Above it, you are usually paying for faster response times, more frequent updates, or dedicated support rather than fundamentally more work being done.
Why We Price It By the Task Instead of By the Tier
Our own maintenance pricing deliberately skips the site-size tier model. A Small Revision, quick fixes taking under an hour, is Ksh 5,000. A Medium Revision, new pages, layout updates, forms, is Ksh 15,000. A Large Revision, redesigns, new features, a full SEO update, is Ksh 30,000. If you would rather not think about it task by task, a Monthly Retainer at Ksh 25,000 covers up to three revisions a month, sorted without back and forth over what counts as billable.
The reason is simple. A small business that rarely needs anything touched should not be paying a "small business tier" fee every single month regardless of whether anything actually happened that month. You pay for the work that gets done, not for a tier label that was assigned to your business on day one and never revisited.
Monthly, Quarterly, or a Retainer: What You Are Actually Paying For
Part of the confusion in this market is that "maintenance" gets sold as if every website needs the same cadence of attention. It does not. A site that changes constantly, bookings, new products, regular content, genuinely benefits from a retainer. A site that barely changes might only need a proper check once a quarter. We go into exactly how to tell which situation you are in over in does your website need monthly maintenance, or is quarterly enough, and how the retainer-versus-pay-per-fix decision plays out in practice in monthly retainer versus pay-per-fix.
What a Fair Quote Should Include, Regardless of the Number
Whatever price you land on, a fair maintenance arrangement should tell you plainly how often backups run, what actually happens if your site gets hacked (is recovery included or billed separately as an emergency), and roughly how fast someone responds when something breaks. Very few quotes in this market state any of that clearly. If a provider cannot answer those three questions without hedging, the price on the page is not really the full picture of what you are buying.
If you already know your site needs regular attention and just want it handled properly, our maintenance service starts at Ksh 5,000 for a single fix, with a straightforward retainer if you would rather not think about it every month.