Ongoing retainer
Monthly maintenance and a bucket of change hours.
Technology · Service
Maintenance & Support
Software degrades without attention. Maintenance retainers keep your systems patched, backed up, monitored and evolving.
Overview
Launch is not the finish line. Dependencies get security patches, browsers change, platforms update their requirements, and business needs shift. Systems left untouched for a year become expensive to change and eventually risky to run.
Maintenance retainers cover security updates, monitoring, backups and a bucket of change hours each month — so small improvements happen continuously instead of accumulating into another big project.
What is included
- Security and dependency updates
- Uptime and error monitoring
- Verified backups with tested restores
- Performance checks
- Content and configuration changes
- Bug fixes within agreed response times
- Monthly change hours
- Quarterly health reporting
Benefits
What this actually changes
Outcomes, not feature lists.
Security stays current
Framework and dependency patches applied on a schedule rather than after an incident.
Problems found first
Uptime and error monitoring means we usually know before your customers tell you.
Small changes stay small
Monthly change hours mean improvements ship continuously instead of queueing into a redesign.
Someone who knows the system
Continuity of the team that built it — no ramp-up cost every time something needs doing.
Process
How we deliver it
Onboarding
Document the system, access, dependencies and current risks.
Stabilise
Clear outstanding updates and set up monitoring and backups.
Maintain
Scheduled updates, monitoring and agreed change hours each month.
Review
Quarterly report on health, incidents and what to plan next.
Use cases
Common ways this is used
Rescue and stabilise
Take over a neglected system, patch it and bring it back to a maintainable state.
Support-only
Monitoring, backups and incident response without ongoing development.
FAQ
Maintenance & Support — questions
Yes, after a technical audit. If the codebase is genuinely unmaintainable we will say so rather than quietly charging a retainer against something that cannot be safely changed.
Response times are set in the retainer and tiered by severity — a site being down and a copy change are not the same urgency.
Yes, with notice. Long gaps do mean accumulated updates, so restarting after a pause may need a catch-up block.
Related