UPDATE: WP Curve was acquired by Go Daddy and is no longer accepting new clients. Please consider one of these alternatives or see below. If you own this listing or this information is incorrect, contact me here.
WP Curve wants to be your outsourced IT department for WordPress sites. The company was founded in 2013 and has quickly grown to hundreds of paying customers because of the dead-simple service: unlimited 30-minute WordPress fixes for $79 a month.
Their team is a truly international operation, with the co-founders Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty split between Australia and California, and the development team in the Philippines and Central America. All are dedicated full-time to WP Curve.
Fun fact: As of September 2014, Dan and Alex have never met in person.
Table of Contents
Is WP Curve Right For You?
The target customer is a small business owner who:
- Has problems with their website but doesn’t have the time or know-how to fix them themselves.
- Doesn’t want to contract out to a new developer for each little tweak they want to make.
- Has a limited budget for IT maintenance but still needs a high-quality site presented to the world.
What WP Curve is NOT good for:
- Building a new website from scratch.
- Larger scale web development projects.
- People looking for a full-time web developer.
Plans and Pricing
The WP Curve “Professional” plan is $79 per month (billed annually, or $99 billed monthly) for “unlimited” 30-minute WordPress website fixes for one domain. I say “unlimited” in quotes because everything is subject to a reasonable use policy. (Don’t be the guy who tries to abuse the system.)
The Professional plan includes detailed notes on your requests, 24-hour live chat and email support, and same-day turnaround in most cases.
The VIP plan is priced at $159 month (billed annually, or $199 monthly), and includes everything in the Professional plan plus some extra bonuses like faster turnaround times, quality control checks, and the ability to submit up to 3 requests at a time.
Each plan comes with a free sign-up bonus of a personalized 18-point site check and review by one of WP Curve’s developers.
Both plans come with a 30-day 100% satisfaction money-back guarantee, and there are no long-term contracts or commitments.
If you don’t imagine needing the ongoing support, you can also tap WP Curve for one-off support for $69 per request.
On-Demand Website Help
With WPCurve, you’re essentially buying access to an on-demand help-desk for your website. Name something you’d like fixes and they’re on it.
Now, to make sure their members get the most out of their subscription, they’ve even started making proactive suggestions for website improvements each week. It’s an interesting strategy for customer retention and they’re really trying to create a legion of raving fans to evangelize the service via word of mouth.
As you can imagine, if WP Curve can save you even just a couple hours a month, or make some tweak to improve your conversion rate, the service easily pays for itself.
WP Curve Alternatives
Because of the short nature of these types of micro web development jobs, it can be cost prohibitive to post them on some freelance platform. You’ll either spend more time posting and screening candidates than the job’s worth, and might not attract the best talent for a 20-minute job. In the freelancer’s mind, is it even worthwhile to bid on it?
The nearest competition is Zen WP, which I’ve been happy with in my trial so far. A friend of mine runs a similar service called Access WP, which has a special offer for VAA visitors.
For one-off fixes, check out WP Fix It.
The other alternative to consider would be Fiverr, and I’ve actually had some success in getting small WordPress fixes done there. But the downsides of course are there’s no long-term relationship, no proactive support, and limited feedback or recourse if something goes wrong. Every time I give someone on Fiverr my login information, I can’t help but think to myself this is either my best decision ever–or my worst.
Have you worked with WP Curve? If so, please be sure to leave a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
WP Curve was a popular service, but since they have gone on to join GoDaddy, I wanted to throw another option out there (at least for small business owners / entrepreneurs). Webmasteronsite.com offers website maintenance and other services on a monthly basis. It’s a bit more costly than WP Curve was, but It’s worth it!
A few people had asked about a good UK alternative. Try http://www.businessitessentials.com
They have a 29£/mo plan for example that Ive used for many months now. Extremely happy. Fast turnaround time and a very friendly support guy.
I run an ecommerce site that they help me with but I dont think there is limitation to what they do
We’ve used WPCurve for about 6 months. They have been very helpful and usually do the task within 3 or 4 hours. We have the VIP service and I’m pretty happy with what they offer for the price. We were handed an incomplete website from our developer and WPCurve has been a big help in working out many of the bugs that we were told couldn’t be fixed and they’ve made tweaks that we were told couldn’t be done. My biggest issue is when having an email conversation about a task with one of the techs, you sometimes end up talking with someone else (on the next shift or whatever) when you are communicating back and forth. Sometimes there is a loss of vision or continuity with the task that needs to be explained again. I’ve also had techs recommend plugins that differed from already installed plugins that previous techs had recommended and installed. Again probably from different opinions and experience among all the different techs working there. But there is a LOT of expertise, they are always friendly, fast and get the job done.
Stay away! It’s too expensive for the quality of service. They never deliver the service on time. In the beginning it was suppose to be up to 8 hours (that’s why I signed up). Now is up to 11 hours and they are always late (I had to wait several times 1 all day, and they only answered after 3 emails asking them where was my work – and no apologies). Had to cancel it. After the cancellation, they charged me anyway. Charging someone for a month’s service that you know you will not deliver because the contract was cancelled? Stay away!!!!
We paid for their VIP service ($199/m) and after a couple of days, we got an email saying that they have cancelled our agreement, stating that “they cannot provide the required service”. Still waiting for the money refund (has been a week now). In the week we had their “services” we ordered 8 (eight) 30min jobs. I wonder what they consider “unlimited 30min jobs” ???
When I first signed up for WP Curve it was magical…and it was $69. I only used them for about 3 months before I stopped using them. It wasn’t necessarily all their fault, I just always forgot to give them enough to do.
I also had a complicated site that I didn’t trust anyone else to be able to update all my plugins without messing it up.
Also, towards the end of my time using them I didn’t really hear much from them and they seemed disorganized. The founder is great and has a passion for the company, but I think they got really popular really quick and might focus more on onboarding than retention. After I quit I got no follow-up emails which I found weird.
Worth a try!
An alternative for these micro outsourcing tasks is WP Jobz.
http://wpjobz.com
It is a pay as you go 24/7 WordPress support service from $5 per Job:
o) You can build a long-term relationship with us
o) You only pay for what you use
o) You can use your jobs on any and all of your sites
o) We want you to be 100% satisfied or we will give you your money back
o) We provide discounts on bulk purchases
I had to leave WPCurve after about 8 months and not being able to put up with the terrible service anymore. It actually got to the point where I dread their “monthly tasks” as I always knew it would knock my site out for a day and I’d have to chase them several times before getting an answer.
Communication is terrible, one time I chased why my site had been down for 12 hours after they were doing a simple plugin upgrade and apparently the engineers working on my ticket had left their shift hours ago and no one had look at it since.
I have since found a much better service provider in the UK and have been overwhelmed by the improvement in service and communication and I am pleased to know that not all companies operate like this.
I am writing this in reply to what Elizabeth wrote, and I wanted to know what service she uses in the UK??? Could you please let me know?
I want to get away from WP Curve as well as their single ticketing systems sucks. Most jobs only get done in 2-3 days. Often I never hear back from them about the status. If this is how the service works, I am definitely happier paying a normal freelancer an hourly fee and get the job done right away.
Thanks,
Cris
Hi Cris,
Sorry I’ve just seen this, I use a company called Connected, great guys – it’s more expensive but worth every penny and the communication is amazing. It’s run by a guy called Martin who is really friendly and will talk you through everything. Hope this isn’t too late!
Hi Elizabeth – who is the UK service you found? I can’t deal with the time differences so I’m looking for a purely UK based company.
thanks!
Hi Alison, company I switched to (and still swear by today) is Connected UK – really friendly bunch, I like that you deal with the same people regularly, they are always quick to fix and reply, they’ve even caught things on my site before I’ve noticed them and got to work on fixing!
I have been with WP Curve for 2 months now, and the first month was good. This month is a nightmare; I submitted a request and 24 hours later I get a reply that they cant do the job. Wasted an entire day! Second, within the last two weeks they got about 4 tickets done for me all to do with formatting. Yesterday I noticed that most of the modifications reverted back to the original layout. And without any apology their simply tell me that they have screwed up my CSS file! I escalated the issue without any response so far! I am getting really annoyed with them. They are ok doing simple jobs, but they have certainly issues with delegating work & client communication.
I used WPCurve for 2 months but stopped now, as its not worth it.
Their work is good, but:
The pro plan features are not worth it and the recommendations they send are either wrong or already implemented in my site.
They take at least 2 days to respond. If you even miss the slightest detail of a task it takes 2 more days or more.
Their chat is hilarious: it says online, but I did not get any response twice.
Its not worth the money – in a month you get max 10 30 minute tasks done (bc of the response time) and that only if you reply instantanious. Realistically I would say 5-6. So paying 70$ for 3h programming time, which you can get cheaper in the same quality on freelancer etc. Moreover then you dont have the hassle of waiting for replies for days but get things done immediately and better communication via freelancer chat or skype.
Have a similar experience as well and it’s unfair getting that amount of work for the money being paid.
Try https://kitedish.com/
Its 95% a similar service. I went over to them after being referred by a colleague. Their system is more fair as its a rollover credit system.
So far no complaints.
I used WP Curve for two months. I really have not enjoyed the service, it usually takes them 2-3 days for them to finish each task, and if you miss a simple detail like your password or misspell a username, you have to resubmit it to them and it takes another 2-3 days for them to finish the task.
I had one task I thought was really simple and what they said they are specialists on, which is formatting the way your site is viewed online and I just needed items to show up properly and I had to resubmit the job 2 times to them and after all that and them assuring me they solved the problem it still was showing up all messed up weird.
It seems like a good deal, but I think they need a lot of work.
I’ve been using WP Curve for my wordpress and they have been really great.
I have just been throwing job after job at them and they haven’t let me down yet.
Love WP Curve. They are awesome. I ran a speed test at GTmetrix.com and then used the report to send them daily fixes for my site.