Retainer · From $2,000/mo · 3-month minimum
A senior engineer who watches your AI-built app so you don't have to.
After the audit and the hardening, the work isn't done — it's started. Dependencies drift. SaaS providers change APIs. The AI you used last month suggests a new pattern that breaks the old one. Maintenance is the boring, expensive part. We do it monthly, on a flat retainer.
Who this is for
Founders who shipped — and now need to keep it shipped.
Maintenance is the right fit when the app is live, has users, and there is no internal engineer to mind it.
Solo founder, live app
You shipped, customers showed up, and now you're scared to touch it
Every change might break something. We become the team that touches it for you.
Post-audit team
You ran the audit, knocked out the criticals, now what?
The medium-risk findings, the slow drift, the new features. We pick those up on a steady cadence.
Bridge to first hire
You're hiring an engineer in 6 months
Until then, we keep the lights on, document everything, and hand off cleanly when your hire starts.
What we do
Boring, on-time, and ours.
A monthly cadence that keeps small problems from becoming launch-week emergencies.
- Monitoring & alerts. Sentry, Better Uptime, log-based alerts. We get paged, not you.
- Dependency updates. Patch + minor monthly, major upgrades planned. CVE response within 24h.
- Backup verification. We restore your DB to a sandbox monthly. Untested backups are not backups.
- Small features & fixes. Roughly 8–12h/month of build, with a clear queue you control.
- Incident response. When something breaks, we respond, fix, and write a 1-page post-mortem.
- Cost watch. LLM bills, hosting, SaaS. If a line item doubles, you'll hear about it that week.
- Monthly status note. What we did. What's next. Where the risks moved.
- Vendor & tool advice. Should we move off Replit? Switch from Vercel? We answer with reasons, not vibes.
Red flags
Signs you needed maintenance yesterday.
If two of these are true, the next bad day will be expensive.
You haven't deployed in 60+ days
Your dependencies have CVEs. Your AI tool has changed defaults. You're frozen because nobody knows what will break.
You don't know if backups work
You've never tested a restore. The day you need them, you'll learn whether they exist.
Customer issues come in via DMs
No error tracking, no support inbox, no ticket trail. Bugs hit the floor and stay there.
Your dev quit and left no docs
The previous contractor is gone. The README has a typo from 2023. We can take inventory.
Your hosting bill is creeping up
Auto-scaling that nobody capped. An LLM endpoint somewhere getting hit too often. We find it.
You're afraid to touch the code
That fear is the problem. Maintenance is what gives you permission to ship again.
Tiers
Pricing that matches the size of the app.
Pick by app surface, not by team size. We'll suggest one in the intake call.
Best for: post-audit teams with a stable app and limited change rate.
- Monitoring & monthly checks
- Dependency updates
- Up to 4h/mo of small fixes
- Business-hours response
Best for: live apps with paying customers, ongoing small improvements.
- Everything in Watchful
- 10–14h/mo of build & fixes
- Same-business-day response
- Monthly strategy call
Best for: revenue-critical apps, regulated workloads, on-call required.
- Everything in Active
- 24/7 on-call, 30-min Critical
- 20–28h/mo of build
- Quarterly mini-audit
FAQ