Pricing for Maintenance and Emergency Help — Fully Disclosed
Three SLA tiers from €199 net per month, one-off services at a fixed price and a free initial analysis beforehand. You see which service sits in which package before you sign, and what is billed outside of it.
3
SLA tiers to choose from
45 min
first response in the Enterprise SLA
6 months
minimum term
24/7
monitoring in every package
Maintenance offers are rarely comparable: one provider bills by the hour, the next sells a package without a response time, the third names no price at all. That is why we disclose our terms in full. The SLA maintenance contract starts at €199 net per month and includes security updates, 24/7 monitoring, the backup service and the monthly report in every tier. What differs is the response time, the service hours and the cadence of ongoing work. If you need help right now but have no contract, the fixed prices for one-off services are further down this page — including emergency support for compromised systems.
Pricing Structure at a Glance
The entry price for ongoing operations
- Basic €199 per month — first response within 8 hours on business days
- Business €349 per month — first response within 4 hours, weekend readiness
- Enterprise €699 per month — first response in 45 minutes, around the clock
- Updates, monitoring, backups and monthly report in every package
All prices net plus VAT. Minimum term 6 months, monthly cancellation thereafter. The SLA tier determines response time and scope — not the size of your catalogue.
The Three SLA Tiers Side by Side
All three packages share the same core: tested updates for core, plugins and server software, monitoring around the clock, daily backups with restore tests, SSL management and a monthly report covering everything that happened on the system. The difference lies in how quickly we commit to responding to an incident, when we are reachable and how tightly the update rhythm is scheduled. Which tier fits depends less on shop size than on the question of how expensive an hour of standstill is for you.
SLA Packages: Prices and Scope
All prices net per month, minimum term 6 months. The full service description with all response and recovery times is on the SLA maintenance contract page.
Basic
For business websites and smaller shops with predictable update needs.
- First response within 8 hours on business days
- Monthly update cycle with staging test
- 24/7 uptime monitoring, 5-minute check interval
- Daily backups, 30-day retention
- SSL management with automatic renewal
- Monthly status report
Business
For revenue-relevant shops where an hour of downtime is genuinely painful.
- First response within 4 hours, extended service hours
- Weekend readiness for critical incidents
- Biweekly update cycle with checkout tests
- Monitoring at a 1-minute interval
- Hour quota for smaller adjustments
- Quarterly performance review
Enterprise
For business-critical shops with high traffic that need round-the-clock cover.
- First response in 45 minutes, around the clock
- Standby including weekends and public holidays
- Prioritized escalation, dedicated contact person
- Monitoring at a 30-second interval
- Extended hour quota and architecture consulting
- Monthly review with action plan
All prices net plus VAT. Emergency support is included in every tier, with the agreed response time. One-off services without an ongoing contract are listed further down this page and on the emergency support page.
What Determines the Price — and What Does Not
We do not calculate by revenue, order volume or number of items. The monthly price follows from the committed response time, the service hours and the cadence of ongoing work. There is a practical reason for that: a small shop with 300 items can be more business-critical than a large catalogue if it is the only sales channel. Conversely, a corporate website with occasional editorial changes is well served by the Basic package. The following factors shape the recommendation in the initial conversation.
Revenue at risk per hour
How much revenue stands still if the shop is unreachable for an hour? That figure decides the SLA tier more often than any technical metric.
Service hours and seasonality
Shops running weekend campaigns or a strong Christmas season need standby outside office hours. Pure weekday operation is fine with Basic.
Complexity of the installation
The number and maintenance quality of extensions, custom modifications and connected systems determine how demanding an update cycle actually is.
Number of environments
Live system only, or staging and development environments as well. More environments mean more safety at deploy time and more upkeep.
Evidence requirements
If you need maintenance records for auditors, insurers or internal compliance, you get more detailed reporting — included in the Business and Enterprise packages.
Who else works on the system
If internal teams or other providers work on the same system, we agree responsibilities and approvals. That belongs in the contract, not in a phone call.
One-off Services: Fixed Prices Without a Contract
Not every need is a standing order. If a website has already been compromised, a server move is due or a single question urgently needs answering, we work without a maintenance contract too. The process is always the same: we assess the case free of charge, name a fixed price and only then start work. For cleaning up compromised systems we state in advance what the price covers — and what would count as additional effort, for example if the analysis reveals a second point of entry.
| One-off service | Price (net) | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Initial analysis and technical assessment | free of charge | Review of version levels, backup situation, availability and obvious risks, with written feedback within one business day |
| Hack cleanup website | from €390 | Containment, malware removal, closing the point of entry, password and key rotation, closing report — details on the WordPress hacked page |
| Hack cleanup small online shop | from €990 | As above, plus review of order, payment and customer data and of the checkout path for manipulated scripts |
| Hack cleanup online shop | from €1,490 | Complete cleanup including forensic evidence collection, review of all extensions and support with the notification under Art. 33 GDPR |
| Immediate help without a contract | €95 per hour | Billed in 15-minute units, no minimum volume, subject to availability — without a committed response time |
| Major upgrade and migration | fixed price after analysis | Scope depends on the starting version and the extensions in use. Approach and calculation basis are on the Shopware major upgrade page |
The initial assessment costs nothing
Maintenance Contract, Hourly Billing or In-House Operation?
Three Cost Models for the Same Operation
Each model has its place. What matters is which costs are visible and which only surface when something breaks.
In-house operation
- Full control over every change to the system
- No recurring external costs in the books
- Internal time is real but appears in no calculation
- No cover during holidays, illness or staff turnover
- At night and on weekends, nobody answers
Hourly billing
- You pay only when work is actually carried out
- A good fit for one-off projects and rebuilds
- No committed response time when something breaks
- Effort usually starts once the damage has been done
- Annual costs are hard to quantify in advance
SLA maintenance contract
- Fixed monthly cost from €199 net, known in advance
- Committed first response: 8 hours, 4 hours or 45 minutes
- Updates, backups, monitoring and reporting included
- A permanent contact who knows the installation
- Six-month minimum term — in exchange for predictable operations
How Your Quote Comes About
Enquiry with a URL
You give us the address of your shop or website and briefly describe what concerns you. That is all we need to start — credentials only later, and only if you release them.
Free initial analysis
From the outside, we check version levels, availability, encryption, obvious security risks and load time. You receive the result in writing, in plain language and without sales pressure.
Recommendation of an SLA tier
Based on the analysis and your revenue risk, we recommend Basic, Business or Enterprise — and explain why the lower tier is sufficient in your case if that is what we find.
Service description and contract
You receive a written service description with response times, maintenance windows, escalation paths and the data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR. Only then does billing start.
Onboarding and inventory
In the first month we set up monitoring, backups and the staging environment, document the installation and work off the update backlog. The monthly price does not change because of that.
Ongoing operations with reporting
From the second month the agreed cycle runs. Every monthly report shows updates, incidents, availability and open recommendations — verifiable by third parties as well.
Which Tier Fits Which Operation
Response time is the real price difference
Between Basic and Enterprise there are not more features in the sense of more checkmarks, but shorter paths when it counts. In the Basic package we handle an incident in the next working block; in the Enterprise package work starts within 45 minutes, at night as well. If you want to know what that difference is worth, our article on downtime cost per minute does the maths.
- Basic: business days, first response within 8 hours — for websites and secondary channels
- Business: extended hours plus weekend — for the main sales channel
- Enterprise: around the clock, 45 minutes — when standstill costs money immediately
What the Monthly Price Does Not Include
Honest pricing also means naming the limits. The maintenance contract covers planned operations and the response to incidents. Anything that changes the functional scope of your system is project work and is quoted separately. This separation protects both sides: you do not pay a flat fee for services you never use, and we do not have to cross-subsidize operations with development work.
- New features, interfaces and extensions that go beyond fixing defects
- Relaunches, redesigns and taking over editorial content work
- Major upgrades to a new main version — quoted as a project after analysis, see Shopware major upgrade
- Third-party licence and hosting fees, which we always pass through transparently and never mark up
- Cleaning up a system that was already compromised before the contract started — the fixed price for hack cleanup applies instead
- Training and workshops for your team, which we offer separately on request
Want to know which tier fits your shop?
Send us the URL — we check the technical condition, name the risks and recommend the lowest tier that actually covers your revenue risk.
When a Maintenance Contract Pays Off
The calculation is unromantic: a maintenance contract pays off when the expected cost of an incident exceeds the annual cost of the contract. The incident side includes not only the cleanup itself but also lost revenue during the outage, the effort for notifying the supervisory authority, customer enquiries and the internal time consumed. A single serious incident per year often exceeds the annual cost of the Basic package. Our article Emergency Plan: What to Do When Your Website Is Hacked describes how such a case unfolds.
There is a second effect that never shows up on a single invoice: those who update regularly rarely face large jumps. A system that has stood still for three years can no longer be updated within one maintenance window — ongoing care then turns into a migration project. Which services belong in a contract and which are billed as a project is set out in Maintenance Contract: Key Contents; which records insurers want to see is covered in Cyber Insurance: Which Maintenance Records Count. Prices for the individual building blocks are on the services and SLA maintenance contract pages.
Three Typical Pricing Decisions
Illustrative, anonymized cases from our maintenance practice (project experience) — concrete figures and references are shared in a personal conversation.
Key Takeaways
- SLA maintenance from €199 net per month — Business €349, Enterprise €699, each with a six-month minimum term
- Updates, 24/7 monitoring, verified backups, SSL management and a monthly report are included in every tier
- The price difference lies in response time, service hours and update cadence — not in the size of your catalogue
- Without a contract: immediate help at €95 per hour, hack cleanup from €390 (website) or from €1,490 (shop, small shops from €990)
- The initial analysis is free; we name fixed prices only after we have seen the system