Technical Support & Maintenance
An ongoing support retainer with a defined response time, a real ticketing system, proactive monitoring, and a named engineer who knows your system
Technical support is what happens to software after it is delivered — and it is the phase most projects budget for least. A system that nobody patches, monitors or backs up does not stay working; it degrades quietly until it fails loudly. We provide ongoing support and maintenance with a defined response time, a ticket trail you can audit, and proactive monitoring that catches most problems before your users report them.
In short
- Defined response times by severity, written into the agreement — not "we will get to it".
- A real ticketing system. Every request logged, tracked and auditable; nothing lives in a WhatsApp thread that scrolls away.
- Proactive, not just reactive: uptime and resource monitoring, application error tracking, certificate expiry alerts, and patching on a schedule.
- A named engineer who knows your system, backed by the team — so you are not re-explaining your architecture to a new person every ticket.
- We support systems we did not build, after an inheritance audit that tells you honestly what state the code is in.
Response Times You Can Hold Us To
Severity levels defined in the agreement, each with a committed first-response time, and monthly reporting on whether we met them.
Ticketed and Auditable
Every request logged in a helpdesk with a history you can review. You always know what was raised, by whom, and what was done about it.
Proactive Monitoring
Uptime probes, resource thresholds, application error tracking and certificate expiry alerts — so most incidents are ours to notice, not yours to report.
A Named Engineer
Someone who knows your architecture and your quirks, with the wider team behind them for cover and escalation.
Support Tiers
Three standard tiers. Which fits depends on how much downtime your business can absorb, not on how large your company is.
| Essential | Business | Critical | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coverage window | Business hours | Extended hours | Extended hours plus out-of-hours for critical incidents |
| Critical incident response | Same business day | Within hours | Fastest committed response, out of hours included |
| Proactive monitoring | Uptime monitoring | Uptime, resources and application errors | Full monitoring with agreed alert thresholds and escalation path |
| Security patching | Scheduled | Scheduled plus urgent out-of-cycle patches | Scheduled plus urgent, with a post-incident report |
| Backup verification | Backups configured | Backups plus periodic restore testing | Backups, restore testing and a documented recovery objective |
| Included development time | Not included | A monthly allowance of small changes | A larger monthly allowance with priority scheduling |
| Reporting | On request | Monthly report | Monthly report plus a quarterly technical review |
Exact hours and response commitments are set in the signed agreement so both sides are measured against the same numbers. We do not publish an SLA we would then need to argue about — we agree it with you in writing.
What Support Covers
Bug Fixing
Defects in delivered software, triaged by business impact rather than by who reported them loudest, with a root cause noted rather than a symptom patched.
Security Maintenance
Framework, library and OS security updates applied on a schedule, with urgent out-of-cycle patching when a serious vulnerability is disclosed.
Performance & Monitoring
Watching resource trends, slow queries and error rates, and acting on the trend before it becomes an outage.
Small Changes
Content updates, configuration changes, new report fields and minor features — within the monthly allowance on Business and Critical tiers.
What You Get as a Support Client
- A ticketing channel with an audit trail — every request recorded, assigned and closed with a written resolution.
- Monitoring and alerting on your systems — uptime, resources, application errors and certificate expiry, configured and watched.
- A monthly support report — tickets raised and resolved, response times achieved, patches applied, and anything we recommend addressing.
- Verified backups — not just configured, but periodically restore-tested, because an untested backup is only a hope.
- A documented environment — where things run, how to restart them safely, and what to do first at 3am.
- A quarterly technical review — on the Critical tier: technical debt, capacity, security posture, and what to plan for next quarter.
How We Onboard a Support Client
- Inheritance audit — we review the codebase, infrastructure, dependencies and backups, and give you an honest written assessment of what state it is in.
- Remediation of blockers — anything that would make support unsafe (no backups, unpatched critical vulnerabilities, no access control) is fixed before the retainer begins.
- Monitoring setup — uptime probes, resource metrics, error tracking and alert thresholds agreed with you.
- Documentation — we write the runbook that should already exist: architecture, access, deployment, and recovery.
- Agreement and onboarding — tier, response commitments, escalation contacts and the ticketing channel, all in writing.
- Steady state — tickets, proactive monitoring, scheduled patching, and a monthly report you can hold us to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will you support a system your team did not build?
Yes, and a significant part of our support work is exactly that. We start with an inheritance audit and give you a written, honest assessment. Occasionally that assessment says the system needs remedial work before it can be responsibly supported — we would rather tell you that up front than take a retainer for something we cannot actually keep running.
What counts as a critical incident?
The definition is agreed with you, because it differs by business. Typically: the service is down, payments are failing, data is at risk, or a security incident is in progress. Setting this precisely in advance is what stops every ticket from being labelled urgent.
Is support charged monthly or per incident?
A monthly retainer, because that is what funds the proactive half — monitoring, patching and backup verification — which is where most of the value actually is. Pay-per-incident sounds cheaper and reliably costs more, since it only pays for firefighting after something has already broken.
What is not covered by a support retainer?
New feature development, major version upgrades, redesigns and migrations are quoted separately. Business and Critical tiers include a monthly allowance for small changes; anything beyond that is scoped as its own piece of work so support hours are never quietly consumed by development.
Do you take over hosting as well?
We can, and it usually makes support faster because we control the environment. It is not a requirement — we support applications on client-owned and third-party infrastructure too, provided we have the access needed to do the job.
What happens if we want to leave?
You get your documentation, credentials, monitoring configuration and runbook, and we cooperate with whoever takes over. There is no lock-in mechanism. A support relationship should continue because it is working, not because leaving is painful.
Do you support ERPNext, WordPress and other third-party platforms?
Yes. We run ERPNext, WordPress, Laravel applications and containerised systems in production ourselves, including monitoring and incident response. For third-party platforms our support covers configuration, integration, performance, security and upgrades — not modification of vendor core code.
Put Your System on a Proper Support Footing
Free inheritance audit before any retainer is signed
