What a website AMC actually includes (and what to check before you sign)
“Website AMC” gets sold as a line item and almost never explained. Here is what a maintenance year should actually contain, and the three clauses that decide whether it protects you or just bills you.
What “AMC” is supposed to mean
An annual maintenance contract for a website is a year of someone keeping the site secure, updated, backed up and online after it launches. That is the theory. In practice the term covers everything from a genuine managed service to a renewal invoice with nothing behind it, so the word alone tells you almost nothing. What matters is the schedule attached to it.
What a real maintenance year includes
A maintenance contract worth paying for covers, at minimum, all of the following — and names them in writing, not on a sales page:
- Hosting and uptime monitoring, checked around the clock
- Security patches applied as they ship, not once a year
- Automatic backups, with restore on request
- A set number of content updates each month (your offers, prices, staff, photos)
- Bug fixes at no extra charge for the full term
- SSL certificate kept valid and renewed before it expires
- A named person who answers, with a written response window
If a quote lists “maintenance” as one word with no schedule under it, that is the tell. Ask for the schedule. A provider who manages sites properly already has one.
What usually is not included (and should be spelled out)
Most disputes come from the grey area, so the contract should say plainly which side of the line these fall on: a full redesign, new pages or sections beyond the monthly update allowance, new features or integrations, third-party licence costs (a premium plugin, a payment gateway’s fees), and content you supply late. None of these are unreasonable to charge for. What is unreasonable is discovering the boundary on an invoice you did not agree to.
Typical cost, and why nobody publishes a single number
For a small-business website in India, maintenance is usually a modest fraction of the build cost per year, scaling with how much changes and how fast you need problems fixed. Anyone quoting one fixed AMC price for every site is either overcharging the simple ones or losing money on the complex ones. A real quote asks what the site does first.
The three clauses that actually protect you
1. When the year starts. It should start on the day you go live, not the day you pay a deposit. Otherwise you lose weeks of cover to the build.
2. The response window, in hours. “We’ll get to it” is not a commitment. A number is — 12, 24 or 48 hours by tier, written down, so a Sunday-night outage has a defined answer.
3. What happens at renewal. The contract should say you own the code, design, domain and accounts from launch, and that if you leave, everything is handed across — credentials and documentation — within a fixed number of days. Nothing held hostage. If that clause is missing, the AMC is a lock-in, not a service.
How BuildVaillant does it
Every BuildVaillant build includes a 365-day watch as one written contract: hosting, monitoring, patches, backups, monthly updates and a named human, with the response window and the day-365 handover both in the agreement you sign. The year starts the day you launch. We wrote the whole process out here, and answered the common questions here.
Want this handled for you?
We build the site, then manage it for a full 365 days under a written contract. Tell us the scope and you will have a fixed quote within 24 hours.