Incident management
Monitoring, alerts that come to us, and a named response path.
Operate & protect
Keep the product workingafter the launch.
Monitoring, patching, dependency upgrades and a named engineer for the product you already run. Alerts come to us rather than to your operations manager.
Every mark here links to the engagement it belongs to. See the work →
Product Care is an ongoing arrangement covering monitoring, patching, dependency upgrades and a named engineer for software a company already runs, priced to the outcome after a free initial audit. Alerts go to the engineering team rather than to the client’s operations manager. The arrangement suits companies whose product has no owner after delivery, or where incidents and updates keep crowding out roadmap work.
Choose thiswhen
- The product has no owner after delivery
- Updates and incidents crowd out roadmap work
- You need continuity, not a ticket queue
You get
A named engineer and an agreed response path, security and platform updates, and monitoring with written reporting.
Pricing
Priced Outcome
One agreed price for an agreed outcome, quoted after a free initial audit and approved before delivery begins.
What the estimate depends on- The scope of the outcome you want
- The stage the application is at
- The condition of the existing codebase
- The team the work requires
- How the system is used in production
- The operational complexity around it
Work out what it has to return first: the ROI calculator for operational work, how we measure for everything else.
The other route
Care keeps it safe. It does not move it forward.
Product Care keeps live software running: monitoring, patching, upgrades, a named engineer, an agreed response path. It carries no roadmap. When the product needs continuous development instead, that is an AI-Native Engineering Pod. The two are scoped and priced separately, and often bought together.
Deliverables
What weactually deliver
Maintenance
Vendor API changes, model changes, dependency updates and your own system upgrades - handled as routine work rather than as emergencies.
An improvement backlog
Ranked by value against the KPI, reviewed with you on a set cadence, and worked through rather than admired.
KPI reporting
The agreed operational metric, still measured against the baseline captured before anything was built.
Where it starts
The four places thisusually shows up
Operations
Work moves between people by hand, and every handoff can stall.
- The same record is typed into two systems
- A spreadsheet sits between two applications
- Volume grows, headcount is the only lever
Finance operations
Invoices and approvals depend on somebody remembering to check a folder.
- Month end is a week of copying
- Approvals live in an inbox rather than a system
- Nobody knows the cost per document
Customer support
The answers exist, in documents and past tickets, and finding them is the job.
- The same answer is rewritten daily
- Response time depends who picks it up
- The demo worked, production did not
Reporting and data
The number the business runs on is assembled by hand, twice, differently.
- A report is rebuilt weekly from exports
- Two dashboards disagree
- The data cannot be queried safely
Proof
Engagements thatlooked like this
CrystalCommerce How CrystalCommerce kept scarce inventory accurate across sales channels
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Tunelark How Tunelark connected lesson sales, scheduling and instructor payouts
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Five to Nine How Five to Nine connected event operations, calendars and secure access
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Is this the right engagement for you?
Describe what is actually going wrong. We come back with the outcome, the engagement that fits and the price basis - after a free initial audit.
Recognise this?
Where a system nobody ownsusually shows up
The last project stopped working in month fiveSomething changed upstream, nobody owned it, and by the time anyone noticed the team had gone back to doing it by hand.01
Nobody is watching the numbersUptime is monitored. Accuracy and exception rate are not, so quality drifts invisibly.02
Your team inherited something they did not buildIt works, but changing it is nobody’s idea of a good afternoon, so it stays frozen while the business moves.03
Improvements never get madeThe obvious next optimization is understood by everyone and scheduled by no one.04
The 2am question has no answerWhen an automated workflow makes the wrong call overnight, it is not clear who finds out or who fixes it.05
How we decide
Operating what we build is the only honest quality incentive.
A vendor who never has to run their own work does not feel the cost of building it badly. We do, which is a far more reliable guarantee than a promise about our standards.
- Alerts come to us first, not to your operations manager.
- Exception rate and accuracy are tracked as KPIs, not just uptime.
- Changes go through the same controlled pipeline after launch as before it.
- You can end the arrangement and keep the system running. That is the point of the documentation.
In practice
What fixing a system nobody ownslooks like
Exception rate → threshold → investigation
Watching for drift
A rising exception rate usually means something upstream changed. We treat it as an incident, not a curiosity.
Deprecation notice → migration → verification
Vendor changes
The endpoint that is going away in ninety days is handled in week one, not in week thirteen.
New model → evaluated against baseline → promoted or rejected
Model updates
A newer model is not automatically a better one for your task. It has to beat the current numbers first.
Baseline → current → next improvement
Quarterly KPI review
A conversation about the number, and what we are doing next to move it.
Go deeper
The decisions behindthis kind of work
- ArticleWhat happens when an AI automation fails at 2am?The question that decides whether an automation belongs in your operations.
- ArticleHow to calculate whether an AI automation is actually worth buildingThe arithmetic that decides it, including the two terms most ROI cases leave out and the reason recovered hours are not the same as saved money.
- ArticleWorkflow automation vs. AI agents: which should run your process?A practical comparison of deterministic workflow automation and AI agents, including where each fits and why most production systems need both.
Questions
About a system nobody owns
Like the other five engagements, Product Care is Priced Outcome: the free initial audit looks at what is running and how critical it is, and the arrangement and its cost are set out in writing for you to approve before it starts. It covers monitoring, incident response, maintenance and an agreed amount of improvement work, and anything larger is scoped separately so you always know what is included.
Yes, and the system keeps running. It is on infrastructure you control, the code is yours, and it is documented. Nothing about the arrangement depends on you being unable to leave.
Agreed per workflow based on what it costs you when it stops. A workflow that would halt shipping gets a different commitment from one that produces a weekly report, and we would rather set that expectation honestly than promise the same number for everything.
The engagements are built around businesses doing roughly $5M to $30M in revenue, with software that matters to how they operate and someone who owns it. Outside that range we will still reply - we will just be honest about whether we are the right fit.
All six engagements are Priced Outcome. Start with a free initial audit. We assess the scope, the stage the application is at, the condition of the codebase, the team the work needs and how it runs in production, then set out the proposed work and its cost upfront for your approval before delivery begins. That is why the audit comes before the number rather than after it. There is no rate card and no published starting figure.
Not this one?
The otherengagements
Our roadmap needs a senior team behind it.AI-Native Engineering Pod3 months minimumPriced OutcomeThe AI demo has to work in production.AI Integration Sprint4-8 weeksPriced OutcomeManual work is eating our capacity.Agentic Workflow Automation8-12 weeksPriced OutcomeThe prototype cannot survive real users.Vibe Code Rescue Sprint4-6 weeksPriced OutcomeThe old system is too risky to change.Legacy Modernization2+ quartersPriced Outcome
Before you commit
What you wouldbe signing up for
One bounded outcome
A named result, a fixed window and a scope agreed in writing before delivery starts.
- Commitment
- 4 to 12 weeks
- Price basis
- Priced Outcome
- The problem has an edge you can describe
- You want the cost known first
- Someone inside owns the result
A team against a roadmap
Senior capacity inside your codebase, moving a roadmap week after week.
- Commitment
- 3 months minimum
- Price basis
- Priced Outcome
- The work is continuous, not bounded
- Recruiting would cost a quarter
- You want the same people throughout
Ownership after launch
Monitoring, patching, upgrades and a named engineer for live software.
- Commitment
- Ongoing, cancellable
- Price basis
- Priced Outcome
- It is live and business-critical
- Nobody owns it out of hours
- The risk needs an owner
One agreed price for an agreed outcome, quoted after a free initial audit and approved before delivery begins.
Named quotes go here as clients approve them. See what the engagements produced →
Next step
Already have something built that nobody is looking after?
Tell us what it does and what breaks. We will tell you what it would take to operate it properly, and whether it is worth keeping before we offer to run it.