Support retainers

An integration is live the day it ships. It is operational the day it has been running cleanly for six weeks and has not paged anybody at three in the morning. Our support retainers cover the work between those two points and onwards: monitored process flows, on-call engineers, monthly or weekly health checks, structured change requests, and the SLAs operations teams need before they will sign off on production go-live.

Retainer pricing rather than per-ticket pricing is a deliberate choice. Per-ticket pricing rewards the wrong incentives: an integration that pages frequently becomes profitable for the support vendor, an integration that runs cleanly becomes unprofitable. Retainer pricing aligns us with the client's interest. The integration runs cleanly. The on-call engineer rarely gets paged. The health check finds nothing surprising. The change requests come from new business needs rather than the previous month's accumulated incidents.

What a retainer typically covers: monitoring of every shipped flow with alerting thresholds designed against the integration's failure modes; on-call cover during agreed hours and tiered against business impact; response SLAs that differ by plan; a recurring health-check report against trend data so degradation gets named before it becomes an incident; structured change-request handling; and the boring-but-vital work of keeping connector versions, credential rotations and platform updates current.

Three tiers cover most engagement shapes, from a single integration that needs a light operational safety net through to a multi-system estate that needs round-the-clock cover. The right team to run a support retainer is the team that built the integration in the first place, because the runbook is in their heads as much as the documentation. That is how most of our retainer engagements start.

Some retainers are us doing the work. Others are us being part of your team. A meaningful share of our retainer engagements are training and engineering leadership for in-house teams that want to do their own integration work but value having senior Patchworks and NetSuite eyes in the room: code reviews, architecture sign-off, pair sessions on the tricky bits, and on-call cover for the parts the in-house team is not yet comfortable owning. The retainer covers the hours and the SLAs; the shape of the engagement adapts to whether you want us building, mentoring, or both.

If you have an integration estate that someone else built and you would like us to take it on, we audit, document and stabilise it first, then move it onto retainer. The audit is a fixed-scope piece of work; the move onto SLA happens once the estate is in a state we can defend.