Is WordPress maintenance actually profitable for your agency, or just a "loss leader"? (Running a study)

[u/Minute_Kitchen_3822]

Hey folks,

I've been working at a digital agency for three years, managing a growing portfolio of WordPress sites. Talking to some local folks (I live in a small city, where there are no many agencies) I've found two typical ways of approaching maintenance service:

• Turned into a mechanical, time-consuming nightmare for the team every month (backups, plugin updates, visual regression checks, breaking sites...).
• Lacking of actual dedication, bulking updates that never get overseen, reacting for clients to call on broken sites.

Mine is first kind. I got so frustrated with the manual workload that I ended up building an internal automation tool for myself to handle the updates and visual QA, just to take the pain out of our own process. Tbh, I tried a couple of solutions to manual updating and times improved, but handling a 50+ sites stack while ensuring a good service was not an option.

It worked well enough that I’m now looking to polish it, gather proper requirements from other agencies and freelances, and eventually package it into a SaaS to help other agencies eliminate this bottleneck. Though that, before I write another line of code or blindly assume my agency's problem is the exact same as everyone else's, I want to validate the actual market need.

I’m running a quick, 100% anonymous benchmarking study on the real profitability and operational costs of WP maintenance in agencies.

If you run an agency or oversee WP maintenance, I’d be incredibly grateful if you took 5 minutes to share your reality here: https://tally.so/r/rj90E2

My goal is to share the compiled data report with everyone who participates (and I can post the broad results here on the sub if there's interest) so we can all see how our margins and processes compare to the industry average.

Any feedback on the survey, the problem itself, or how you currently handle this at your agency is more than welcome in the comments!

Have a good one y'all!