How Much Post-Sale Support Is Normal?

Some transition is standard

Essentially every website sale includes a handover, and a seller who refuses one looks like a seller with something to hide. What varies enormously is the shape: how long, how much of your time, and what counts as support versus what counts as continuing to run the business for free. That last distinction is where sales sour, and it sours after closing when your leverage is gone. So it belongs in the agreement rather than in a friendly understanding.

What a reasonable period looks like

For a straightforward content site, thirty days of email availability covers almost everything a new owner genuinely needs. More complex assets justify more — a store with supplier relationships, or software with a codebase, reasonably runs to sixty or ninety days, sometimes with a defined number of calls. What matters more than the length is that it is expressed in both a duration and a volume: thirty days is unbounded if nobody said how many hours.

What is fair to include

Answering questions about how things work. Handing over documentation, credentials and access. Introducing the supplier, the affiliate manager, the freelance writer. Explaining decisions that are not obvious from the outside — why the site is structured that way, which experiments failed. Being reachable when something breaks in the first weeks. All of that is transferring knowledge, which is genuinely part of what was bought.

What is not

Continuing to publish, run campaigns, manage contractors, or handle customer support. Fixing problems that arose after handover from the new owner's own changes. Being on call indefinitely. Training somebody in a skill rather than in your business. Unpaid work on a new roadmap. These are operating the business, not handing it over, and a buyer asking for them is asking you to keep the job you just sold.

Write it so it ends

The clause needs four things: a duration, a channel, a volume, and a definition of scope. Something like thirty days, by email, up to a stated number of hours, covering questions about the business as it was at closing. Then an explicit line that support beyond that is available at an agreed hourly rate. That last sentence is the one that matters — it turns an awkward refusal into a straightforward invoice, and buyers rarely object because it is obviously fair.

Why buyers ask for more than they need

Usually anxiety rather than opportunism. Somebody who has just spent real money on something they do not fully understand wants reassurance that they will not be stranded. A generous, clearly bounded handover addresses that better than a grudging open-ended one, and it costs you less. The sellers who end up trapped are generally the ones who agreed to be helpful without defining it, precisely because they wanted to seem cooperative.

Documentation is what replaces you

The most effective thing you can do is make the support period unnecessary. Written process notes, a credentials list, an explanation of the architecture, a note on which suppliers matter and why — assembled before you list rather than after you sell. This reduces owner dependence, which raises the multiple, and it shortens the handover, which saves your time. It is the rare item that improves both the price and the aftermath.

If it overruns anyway

Point at the clause and offer the hourly rate. If there is no clause, say plainly what you are still willing to do and by when, in writing, and hold to it. Most overruns are drift rather than bad faith, and drift stops when somebody names a boundary. Where money is still outstanding — a holdback or an earnout — be aware the dynamic is different, because the buyer holds something you want, which is a reason to have defined the support scope while you still had leverage. Treat this as general context rather than advice — if a support obligation is written into a binding agreement and you need to know precisely what it commits you to, that is a question for a lawyer in your jurisdiction reading the actual wording.