Website Maintenance
What we've learned so far
Maintenance is usually sold as insurance, which is why it is usually priced badly and delivered worse. What you are actually buying is a response time, and the only number that matters is how long it takes between something going wrong and somebody competent looking at it. On a storefront, an hour of a broken checkout on a Saturday costs more than a year of the arrangement.
That number depends almost entirely on whether the people responding already know the system. A team seeing a codebase for the first time spends the first day working out how it fits together, and that day is charged to you at the worst possible moment. Most of our maintenance work follows a build we delivered, which is why the response times we offer are short enough to be worth paying for. We take on products built by other teams as well, but we read the system properly first, because promising a one-hour response on code nobody has seen is a promise about nothing.
We keep the boundary explicit. Maintenance covers updates, monitoring, fixes and the things that keep the product working as it is. New features are quoted separately, because bundling them is how retainers quietly turn into a queue where urgent fixes wait behind a half-finished feature nobody agreed to.
What this can involve
Shopify Maintenance
Website Maintenance Services
How we work
Agree on the response times
Anything from an hour to 48 hours depending on what it is and what it costs you when it breaks. We set that per severity rather than offering one number for everything.
Put monitoring in place
Uptime, errors, performance and the business-critical journeys. The point is that we find out before your customers tell you.
Keep things current
Platform updates, dependencies, security patches and app conflicts, handled on a schedule rather than when something finally breaks.
Fix what comes up
Triaged against the agreed severity, with the cause identified rather than the symptom patched, so the same thing does not return next month.
Report what happened
What broke, what we did, and anything recurring that would be cheaper to fix properly than to keep responding to.
Where this isn't the right fit
This is not a development retainer. New features, redesigns and anything that changes what the product does are quoted separately. If what you actually want is ongoing capacity to keep building, product partnership is the better arrangement and usually the cheaper one.
If you have an in-house team who know the system and simply need occasional help, you are paying for cover you already have. And if the product is unstable because of how it was built rather than how it is run, maintenance will keep absorbing the same problems every month. That is worth fixing at the source first, which is what a code audit is for.
