Launch is the midpoint
Software is not furniture. It is closer to a building, and buildings have caretakers.
$100 a month, for a site
- Hosting, SSL, and automated backups, verified rather than assumed
- Uptime monitoring, and the repair if something breaks
- Dependency and platform updates applied and tested
- One small content change a month, up to half an hour
- Your Analytics and Search Console figures pulled into your dashboard every night
$250 a month, for anything with a database
- Everything above, for the site and the system behind it
- Database backups tested by restoring them, not assumed from a green tick
- Security monitoring on your data, with alerts when anything drifts from its agreed state
- Priority response ahead of new project work
- A quarterly written review of what your figures show and what is worth building next
It is not an add on
Every site we build, we also run. It is part of the price rather than an upsell, and it is quoted with the build so the number you agree is the number for the year. The first twelve months are committed, and after that it continues month to month for as long as it suits you.
The reason is not revenue. It is that a site nobody is watching quietly rots: a certificate lapses, a dependency goes stale, a form stops delivering and no one finds out until a customer mentions it months later. We would rather not build something and then watch that happen to it.
The cheapest month of stewardship is the one where nothing happened, because something was prevented.
What is yours, and what is ours
Your content, your data, your domain and your brand are yours outright, and your accounts are in your name. The code we write is licensed to you permanently for your own business: use it, change it, hand it to another developer, all without asking us. What the licence does not allow is reselling it, or offering it on to anyone else as a product or a template, because the components underneath it are the same ones the practice is built on.
If you leave
You get the complete site as a zip file and, on request, the code repository transferred to an account you control. If there is a database, you create your own hosting account for it and we move it across. Then we point your domain wherever you tell us to. Nothing is held hostage and nothing stops working.
Already have something that needs looking after
Stewardship is available for sites and systems built elsewhere too, after a review of what is there.