service
Maintenance and ongoing development
A business with a live site or system that needs to keep working, stay secure, and continue to change, without hiring for it.
What you get
- A defined scope: what is covered, response expectations, and what counts as a change versus a fault.
- Dependency and security updates applied on a schedule, not when something breaks.
- Monitoring and an agreed contact path when something is wrong.
- A monthly record of what was done, so the retainer is accountable.
How this differs from website design and development
A project has an end. Maintenance is a continuing obligation with response expectations, and its value is measured by what does not go wrong rather than by what is delivered.
How we approach it
- We begin with an inventory of what is running, what depends on what, and what breaks if it stops.
- We fix the recurring cause rather than the latest symptom, and we record both so the history is legible.
- We agree a response expectation in writing before work starts, because "maintenance" means different things to different businesses.
What is out of scope
- Indefinite availability with no agreed response time. The arrangement states what happens and how quickly.
- Taking responsibility for a system we did not build without first assessing it, because we cannot maintain what we have not read.
How it is priced
Cost is driven by response expectations and by how many moving parts are in scope; an agreed response time is usually the larger variable.
See the pricing page for how that works in practice.
How to start
The first conversation is free and usually takes half an hour. Bring the problem as you experience it — what is not working and what you have already tried.
Tell us what you need
The more specific you are about the problem, the more useful the first reply will be. We read every enquiry ourselves.