---
title: "Ongoing care"
description: "An engineer who knows your systems keeps them running: patches, monitoring, small changes and the response when something degrades. A retainer with a scope agreed in writing and one month's notice on either side."
language: "en"
canonical: "https://zapolu.com/services/ongoing-care/"
---

# Ongoing care

A system that was built well still needs someone to own it. Patches
arrive, dependencies age, an integration partner changes an API, and
the one engineer who knew why a nightly cron exists has left. A
retainer puts a senior engineer on that job for a monthly flat fee,
with the scope agreed in writing, whether the system is a Magento or
Shopify store, a custom service, or the infrastructure
underneath them.

## Scope of a retainer

The scope is agreed in the order and written for your systems. The
usual parts:

- **Security patches and version updates**, applied on a schedule and
  tested before they reach production
- **Monitoring and the response to what it shows:** alerting that fires
  only when a person needs to act, and an engineer who reads it
- **Small changes and fixes:** a configuration change, a broken import,
  a new field in an integration, a performance regression after a
  release
- **Dependency and infrastructure upkeep:** runtime versions, certificates,
  backups that are verified to restore, and hosting costs that are
  reviewed instead of accumulating
- **A written weekly check-in** in every week with work on a request or
  a request still open: what was done, what comes next and what we
  need from you

Work the scope does not cover, such as a new feature or a migration,
is quoted separately as [build work for a fixed price](/how-we-work/).

## Pricing

A monthly flat fee for the agreed scope, paid in advance for each
month. The fee buys the scope, not a number of hours, and unused scope
is not carried over. Either side can end the retainer with one month's
notice. There is no minimum term.

## Response times

The retainer on its own promises professional care and no response
time. The optional response time guarantee (SLA) adds one, for a
further monthly fee: a critical request, such as the store being down
for customers, gets a response within two coverage hours, a serious
one within one business day, and any other within three business
days. Coverage is business days from 9:00 to 17:00 CET. The
guarantee is for a response, which confirms the request and its
priority and says that work has started, and not for a resolution.
There is no on-call service.

## Outside the scope

- **The engineer who knows your system reads the request**, today the
  founder. There is no rotating pool and no account manager in between.
- **The scope is written down.** The fee stays predictable for both
  sides because the retainer covers the agreed scope and nothing else.
- **Build work is a separate order** with its own fixed price. A new
  feature or a migration is never billed through the retainer.

## Typical situations

- The agency that built the system has gone quiet, and nobody can say
  who applies the next security patch
- One in-house engineer carries production alone, and holidays are a
  risk
- The founder is the de facto on-call engineer
- A build we delivered is going live, and you would rather we kept
  operating it than hand it over on launch day

## The first step

For a live system we have not seen, the usual first step is the
[initial technical audit](/services/technical-audit/), which tells
both sides what the retainer would be taking on. For a system we
built, the retainer can follow the handover directly.
[Tell us about your systems](/contact/) to start.