Maintenance Contract

Software maintenance and support contracts

Someone to keep the system alive after it ships. Billed hourly against a three month minimum, running indefinitely after that, covering the unglamorous work that decides whether software is still running in five years.

You need this when

The person who maintained it left and was never replaced

Dependency and security updates have been deferred for a year

Something breaks and the plan is to hope it does not happen again

What it covers

Keeping the lights on

Dependency and security updates, certificate renewals, platform deprecations, and the steady drip of maintenance that stays invisible right up until it is an outage.

Incident response

When it breaks, someone who already knows the system looks at it. Not someone reading the codebase for the first time while your users wait.

Small changes

The fixes and features too small to be a project but which never stop mattering. They accumulate into the difference between software people tolerate and software people use.

How it works

Billed hourly for the hours actually worked, with a three month minimum to start. After that it runs indefinitely, with no end date and no renewal ceremony. A quiet month is billed as a quiet month, and if you want out once the minimum is served you tell us.

Common questions

Why a three month minimum?

Because the first weeks are spent learning your system. An engagement shorter than that bills you for the learning and delivers the benefit to nobody.

What happens when the minimum is up?

It continues indefinitely until you say otherwise. There is no fixed term to renew and no automatic escalation waiting at the end of it.

Do you maintain systems you did not build?

Yes, that is most of them. If the system is unfamiliar or in rough shape we will usually want an audit first, so that we are quoting against something real.

Need someone on the hook?

Start a contract