A Partnership You Can Leave, Which Is Why You Won't Want To
Support with named response times, maintenance that keeps the system alive, and an exit you could take any month.
Every agency calls itself a partner. The test is structural, not sentimental: a partner is someone you could leave without pain, and stay with because the work keeps being worth it. Lock-in is the opposite of partnership wearing its costume.
The exit, written first
- The repository lives in your organisation from day one, with us invited into it, not the reverse.
- Accounts — hosting, domains, stores, analytics — are in your name. We hold access, never ownership.
- Documentation is written for a team that has never met us: environment setup, architecture decisions, the credentials map.
- If you leave, the handover is a short meeting, not a project. We know because we have done it, and the departures were civil.
What support actually means
- A named response time for production incidents, in the contract, with what counts as an incident defined so 8pm is not a debate.
- Maintenance as a habit: dependency updates, security patches, backup checks and monitoring on a schedule, not when something breaks.
- A monthly note you can read in two minutes: what was updated, what the monitoring saw, what we recommend next and what it would cost.
- Small evolutions inside the retainer, real projects quoted as projects. The line between the two is written, so neither of us argues about it.
Why long-term is in our interest too
The economics are simple and worth saying out loud: winning a new client costs us far more than keeping one, so the incentive that actually operates on us is your system staying healthy enough that next quarter's conversation is about new work, not repairs. An agency that ships and vanishes has the opposite incentive. Structure beats sentiment, so we chose the structure.
- 15-20% of build cost per year keeps a system healthy
- 2 min the monthly report, or it does not get read
- any month when you could leave, with everything in hand
The proof of a partnership is what leaving would cost you. If the answer is almost nothing, the staying means something.
Frequently asked questions
What does ongoing support cost?
Plan for fifteen to twenty percent of the initial build cost per year. That covers updates, security patches, hosting supervision, backup verification and small evolutions. A system with no maintenance budget does not stay still, it degrades — and the degradation is invisible right up until it is expensive.
How fast do you respond when something breaks?
Production down gets a response the same day, and the realistic figure is hours — the contract states the number, because a promise without a number is a mood. Non-blocking issues are triaged into the normal rhythm. What you will never get is silence, which is the actual thing people fear when they ask this question.
Can we take maintenance in-house later?
Yes, and we will help you do it: the documentation is already written for that reader, and a paid handover sprint gets your hire productive in weeks. Some clients keep us for the quarterly work after moving daily operations inside. That mix is fine — the system was built to be operable by whoever you choose.