Cultivate Care
We’re your long-term creative partner to maintain and improve your theme.
Standard Support
Our standard level of support is included with every site we launch. There’s no ongoing retainer and we only invoice for the time it takes to perform the work.
If you need new creative work, just ask and we’ll add you to our support queue. We typically take anywhere from a few days to couple of weeks to perform the work, depending on complexity and scheduling.
- 👍 No retainer required: just shoot us an email if you need work on your site
- 😱 No surprise invoices: we only invoice for actual work, not answering questions or emails
- 🗓️ One monthly invoice: if we spend 30min or less in a month, you won’t get an invoice at all!
Cultivate Care – a proactive approach to improving your theme.
As SEO guidance changes, new blocks become popular, and the WordPress block editor evolves, we are constantly updating and improving our core starter themes.
With Cultivate Care, we make all of these recommended improvements to your theme with each major WordPress release for only $250/month (billed yearly).
You don’t have to wait for your next SEO audit to find out about the new recommended theme changes – we hear about them first and roll them out to all Cultivate Care clients with each major WordPress release. We’ll review the list of recommended changes and implement the ones you would like.
White Glove WordPress Updates
We also perform a white-glove WordPress update, testing the new version of WordPress on your staging environment to ensure there are no issues. If there are breaking changes in WordPress, we want to identify and resolve them on staging before your live site is updated.
Priority Inbox & Monthly Support included
Any time you need something new on your site – maybe a new block, or style revisions to existing site features, or any kind of creative work – Just email us! As a Cultivate Care customer, your email will move to the top of our inbox.
We include 1 hour of monthly support (a $250/month value) as part of Cultivate Care. The vast majority of our clients need less than 1 hour of monthly support, but if you need additional support beyond this, you’ll only be billed hourly for the time exceeding the 1 hour.
Access to premium plugins
We’re building a collection of premium plugins to add unique and valuable functionality to our Cultivate Care websites. Instead of selling the plugins individually, your Cultivate Care license key will give you access to them all.
Signup whenever you’re ready
Many clients sign up for Cultivate Care at site launch, but you can sign up at any point. The only requirements are that you’re using a CultivateWP theme (built through Go, Pro, or VIP) and that your host includes a staging environment.
Cultivate Care is $250/month (billed yearly) and covers a single website. Additional site licenses are available at half price, but do not increase the included hours of monthly support.
Frequently Asked Questions
Many of our clients use a tech support company like NerdPress. If that’s you, continue to reach out to them for your regular tech issues; they’ll escalate any theme-related issues to us.
We like to say “our support starts where theirs ends.” Tech support companies often include “Quick Support Requests” for theme tweaks requiring less than 15 minutes. CultivateWP Support fills the gap by resolving larger, more complex design updates and technical issues.
CultivateWP Support is here when you have creative needs: adding a new block or feature, modifying or redesigning an existing block, changing your recipe/how-to card layout, changing colors/fonts/spacing, redesigning your post-header/site-header/footer, or correcting a breaking change due to a WordPress or plugin update.
Priority Inbox is a feature of our Cultivate Care plan. We receive multiple support requests daily. We’re usually able to work through them in just a few days, but complex requests sometimes take a week or two. When a major WordPress updated is released, we often get backed up several weeks as support requests multiply.
With Priority Inbox, all your emails are moved to the top of our support queue and addressed before our Standard Support emails. That means we’ll answer your questions first and we’ll assign your work to our team before Standard Support requests that come in around the same time.
When it comes to major WordPress point releases you might consider reaching out to us for a White Glove Update. Since the introduction of the Gutenberg block editor, WordPress changes can be rather dramatic as new features and functionality are added. In those cases it makes sense to have your theme creator test and fix any breaking changes to the theme itself. With our White Glove Update service, we’ll copy your site to staging, run the updates, and correct any breaking changes to the theme.
Prior to a major WordPress release, our team tests the beta version to identify potential breaking changes and new features. We document our findings on our WordPress Updates page and email our clients, so you’ll know ahead of time if we think this WordPress release is safe to update yourself, or if we recommend a white glove update.
Standard Support plan: if you request a White Glove Update, we’ll schedule it after we’ve completed all the Cultivate Care White Glove Updates, and will invoice you at the end of the month for time spent performing actual work. Most sites require 1-2 hours of work ($250 – 500), but since every site is unique, as well as every major WordPress update, we don’t have a flat-rate for this service. There are typically two major point releases annually.
Cultivate Care plan: We’ll automatically schedule a white glove update for you after every major WordPress update. You will not be invoiced separately as White Glove Updates are included in our Cultivate Care plan.
A common support request is a Secondary Site Launch. If you have another blog and a theme we built using Go, Pro, or VIP, we can make a new theme using your existing theme as a starting point, then set it up on staging and deploy it to your secondary site. We have one client with 5 sites, all running the exact same theme but with different logos and colors!
It’s effectively Cultivate Go but with your own custom theme. We customize your theme with your secondary site’s logo, brand colors, and typography, and then we set it up on your staging site and launch your site in just 1 week and for only $2,500 (half the price of Cultivate Go).
As an example, you may use Cultivate Pro ($16k) for your primary site, and then spend an additional $2.5k for your secondary site—and you end up with two sites with the exact same features & functionality for a total of $18.5k. Our Secondary Site Launch is a great way to lower the overall cost of multiple sites and deploy the same back-end so your editors use the same technology between both sites.
Standard support has no ongoing retainer, so you only pay for what you need. Our standard hourly rate is $250/hr, billed in 15min increments, and we send out invoices at the end of the month for actual time spent performing work you requested. If you request nothing, or if your requests are simple and take us less than 30 minutes for the month, we simply won’t issue an invoice.
Cultivate Care is $3,000/yr and includes up to 1 hour of support each month, which is about what most clients have historically asked for on average. If you exceed the included 1 hour, we will send you an invoice at the end of the month for actual time spent in excess of 1 hour performing work you requested at our standard hourly rate. If your requests don’t exceed 2 hours, we simply won’t issue an invoice.