Application Maintenance Retainer

The application works and the person who built it has moved on. This keeps it working: dependencies brought current every month, small things fixed, your error log read by someone whose job it is, and a monthly report so you know what state it is actually in. At $100 a month it is the cheapest way to stop an inherited application quietly rotting while everyone assumes somebody is watching it.

What you get

• Monthly dependency updates for one application, with the test suite run
• Small fixes and small changes — the kind measured in minutes
• Your error and exception log reviewed monthly, with anything new raised with you
• A monthly report: what was patched, what was fixed, what is still open, and what we think is coming
• Somewhere to send a question about the application during business hours

What this does not cover

• An open-ended amount of work. The monthly allowance is fixed and agreed in writing before the first month. "Small fixes" means work measured in minutes; anything that needs a day of investigation is a Bug Fix Block, and we will tell you which one it is before starting rather than after.
• Rollover. Unused time in one month does not add to the next. A retainer buys attention every month, not a bank of hours — if hours you can save up is what you want, buy a Bug Fix Block when you need it.
• New features. This keeps an application running; building on it is a Web Application Build Sprint.
• A second application, which is a second retainer.
• The server it runs on. Hosting, monitoring and backups are managed infrastructure and are billed separately.

Who it fits

One production application that nobody owns any more and that you cannot afford to find broken. If all you want is the dependencies brought current once or twice a year, buy a $60 Dependency Patch Run instead — over twelve months the retainer costs considerably more, and it is only worth it if you want the fixes and the reporting too.