System care · continuity
Ongoing system care (retainer)
Go-live is easy — staying alive is harder.
01
The situation
No in-house owner for the system you rely on. Bugs and "small" jobs pile up until something snaps at the worst moment — usually when the one person who knows it is on leave.
Agency retainers feel like ticket roulette: new face every week, context re-explained, small fixes billed like projects.
Packages rot, certificates expire, dependencies drift — nobody scheduled the boring work because everyone was busy shipping.
02
What you get
Priority access, proportionate improvements, and health checks from people who already know your stack — not ticket roulette with a new face every week.
Monthly rhythm: health check, small improvements that match load, named line when production wobbles.
Tier matched to how hard you lean on the system — from light hygiene to “you are our ops safety net”.
03
What care covers
- Health checks on backups, deps, certs, and load-bearing shortcuts
- Proportionate tweaks — not a new programme every month
- Named line when production wobbles — humans who know your stack
- Security and dependency hygiene in sensible cadence
- Small improvements batched — quotes, reports, permissions fixes
- Tier matched to load — from £250/mo; scoped in your review
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How care runs
Monthly rhythm — continuity from people who already know your stack.
Step 1 Week one
Onboard the stack
Access, deploy path, load-bearing shortcuts, and who we call inside your team when a decision is needed.
Step 2 Each month
Health check cadence
Backups, dependencies, certificates, and the boring hygiene that falls off when everyone is shipping.
Step 3 Right-sized
Proportionate tweaks
Small fixes batched to load — quotes, reports, permissions — not a new programme every month.
Step 4 When it hurts
Named line when it breaks
Humans who know your stack when production wobbles — not ticket roulette with a new face every week.
From £250/mo scaled to load — tier picked in your review, not a brochure ladder.
04
Signs this might be you
- Go-live was fine; month six is harder than month one
- You rely on a freelancer who is brilliant but not always available
- “Small” fixes queue until something customer-visible breaks
- Nobody internally wants to own deploys or upgrades
- You are about to renew hosting or APIs without a maintenance plan
- Board asks uptime questions nobody can answer quickly
05
What care is — and is not
Continuity from people who already know what is load-bearing — not unlimited feature factory on a retainer.
We batch proportionate work: fix, harden, document — aligned to how hard you lean on the system.
06
How tiers work
Light: hygiene, monitoring, small fixes. Heavier: roadmap slices, integration tweaks, release support.
We pick a tier in your review based on reality — not a brochure ladder you cannot use.
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Good fit when
- System is live and business-critical
- You want continuity without a full-time hire
- Someone inside can accept handoffs and own day-to-day ops
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Probably not when
- You need a major rebuild — stabilise or rescue first
- You want 24/7 enterprise SLA on a micro retainer
- Nobody internally will answer when we need a decision