Ongoing care
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.
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.
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, 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 to start.
Related services
- DevOps & infrastructurePragmatic infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and incident runbooks, sized for e-commerce, built to reduce production incidents.
- Fractional CTO & technical advisoryA senior engineer advises you on vendor selection, the roadmap, hiring and due diligence, on a monthly retainer without project deliverables.
- Initial Technical AuditAn assessment of your store's technical condition in six areas, plus any others agreed in the order. You get a written report with the findings, their severity, the recommended steps and an indicative cost estimate, and we present it at an online meeting.