Agency hosting margin calculator
Price a hosting retainer honestly: what you bill each client against the platform bill and your care hours, with the margin per client, the margin across the whole client base, and the minimum price that hits your target.
A hosting line item is only worth billing if it survives the platform bill and your own care hours. Enter your price per client, your platform bill and your care time, and get the margin per client, the total across the client base, and the minimum price that carries your target margin.
By Sam Moreton
Researched
Calculator
Assumptions
- Recurring care is planned at 0.5-2 hours per client per month: updates, backup checks, a short report and the small requests that land anyway.
- One-off onboarding and migrations, pass-through costs the client is billed separately (domains, plugins, licences, email) and taxes are excluded from both sides. Both sides are the agency's own numbers: the calculator never prices a vendor plan or a market rate for care hours.
Formula vv0.1 / last reviewed 2026-10-10
Hosting is the quiet line item in a care plan. It looks like pure margin, and then it isn't: the platform bill lands monthly, the care hours land weekly, and nobody has ever written down which clients actually cost what. This calculator prices the margin per client properly, in cash and in your time.
Who this is for
Agencies and freelancers who bill a monthly hosting or care retainer and want to know what it earns after the platform bill and the support time. Also for anyone about to quote a price: the target-margin mode turns your cost base into a floor under the price before a number goes in front of a client.
How to read the result
Three inputs do most of the work: how many client sites the platform carries, what each client pays per month, and what the platform bills you. The care hours start as an assumed band, printed under the result, and accept your own figure once you have timed a normal month.
Read both margins. The cash margin is price minus platform cost, and it flatters you. The time margin subtracts your care hours at your rate, and it is the true one. If you skip the hourly rate, the calculator reports the break-even instead: the hourly cost at which care time erases the cash margin entirely. That number tells you whether the retainer is a business or a favour you keep doing.
What it leaves out
Onboarding and migrations are excluded, because they are usually quoted once, separately. Pass-through costs the client pays directly, domains, licences, email, sit outside the margin on purpose, and so do taxes. The band cannot see client behaviour either: the client who opens a ticket every Monday is real and unmodelled, and that client is why the high edge of the hours band exists.
When to trust it
Trust the verdict when the roster is stable, the platform bill is known and your care time is roughly even across clients. Suspect it when one client dominates the hours, when sites sit on different server sizes at different costs, or when the care plan promises work that takes people, like design tweaks. In those cases split the base: run the calculator on the straightforward clients and price the demanding ones individually.
Where to go next
The agency hosting overview covers the model in the round. If the margin holds and the constraint is how many clients fit on the current box, the WordPress capacity estimator answers that, and the Cloudways review shows what the platform bill buys at the tier an agency actually runs.
FAQ
Why do I have to type my own prices?
Both sides of the margin are your numbers on purpose. A calculator that quoted a platform's list price would be guessing at plans it has not measured and would age badly the day the list changes. You take the figures you actually pay and actually bill.
What does the target margin do?
It turns the margin into a minimum price. At a target of t percent, the price has to cover cost plus care time divided by one minus t, so the calculator reports the price per client below which the margin misses. With no target named, the verdict is judged at break-even: profitable or not, and nothing more.
Why is the care-hours figure a band?
Because it is a planning band, not a measurement. Half an hour to two hours per client per month covers updates, backup checks and small requests. Tick the box and put your own figure in once you have timed a normal month; the assumed band should not set a real price.