Your production software
breaks quietly. We make sure
you know before your users do.
A named engineer handles software maintenance and support for your live application. Bug triage with SLAs. CVE patches in 48 hours. Weekly dependency audits. Monthly maintenance reports. One retainer. Everything scheduled, documented, and committed to your repo.
Ongoing Service Agreement
Sample maintenance retainer scope. Yours is scoped to your application.
Two commit histories.
One for the team that had a plan.
One for the team that did not.
"We hadn't updated our dependencies in 14 months. The audit found 6 high-severity CVEs active in production. None of them showed up in our monitoring because we weren't looking."
Common finding from Redefine pre-engagement technical audits
Know your scope and price
before you talk to
anyone.
No discovery call. No waiting for a salesperson to explain options. Select your application type, coverage tier, and the services your application needs. The scope card updates instantly. Send the result as your project brief, and we send a proposal within 24 hours.
Application maintenance
services. One retainer.
Everything
documented and on record.
Root cause found. Not just patched. Every fix on record.
Report a bug through Slack, email, or your preferred channel. The engineer classifies severity against your SLA within 30 minutes during coverage hours. The fix ships within the committed window. You get a resolution note explaining what broke, why, and what changed.
- P1 bugs acknowledged within 30 minutes
- Root cause documented for every issue — not just surface fixes
- Monthly bug pattern report: trends, volume, categories
CVEs patched before they become your problem. Not after.
Your engineer monitors security advisories daily. When a CVE affects a dependency in your stack, the patch is researched, tested in staging, and deployed within 48 hours. You receive a written advisory note: what was affected, what was done, and what the risk was.
- CVE monitoring across your full dependency tree — not just top-level packages
- Every patch staged and tested before it reaches production
- Written risk assessment per patch — on file for audits and handoffs
Everything done to your software this month, in writing.
Every retainer includes a monthly report: bugs fixed, patches applied, dependencies updated, performance compared to last month. You always know what state your application is in. No status meeting needed.
Weekly audit. Monthly update sprint. No dangerous package debt.
Your dependencies are audited every week. Updates that need regression testing go into a monthly sprint so packages never accumulate into a security or compatibility crisis.
Baselines set in week one. Problems caught before users notice.
Performance baselines are measured for your critical pages and API endpoints during onboarding. When response times or error rates cross your thresholds, the engineer investigates. Your users do not notice. You get a report.
A Shopify maintenance retainer
that improved sales, retention, and
organic reach for a growing sports brand.
Core Pickleball
Shopify Ecommerce, Sports and Fitness
Core Pickleball needed a single team to handle ongoing improvements to navigation, product pages, and marketing infrastructure — without spinning up a new project brief for each one.
Email campaigns were set up but untested. No loyalty program was in place. Organic search rankings were flat. Product page trust signals were thin. Every potential improvement required a new proposal, a new scope, and a new approval cycle. Work accumulated as debt instead of getting done.
Without a retainer, every change required a new project brief and a new engagement. Nothing got proactively maintained.
Navigation improvements drove higher conversion rates on product pages. A new loyalty program increased repeat purchases and retention. Email automation campaigns activated a previously idle list. SEO work lifted organic search visibility over the following months.
Ongoing retainer coverage replaced the reactive, one-project-at-a-time model that was keeping Core Pickleball from compounding their marketing gains.
Four things most software
maintenance services skip.
We include all of them.
What CTOs and operations leads ask before signing a software maintenance retainer.
Software maintenance keeps deployed software healthy: security patches, dependency updates, bug triage, and performance monitoring. Ongoing development adds new features. The maintenance retainer covers operational health — not the product roadmap. If you need both, they run as separate scopes. Some clients pair a maintenance retainer with a dedicated development team to keep the two tracks from competing for the same budget and attention.
Yes. The audit produces the baseline. The retainer maintains it. All new maintenance engagements start with a technical onboarding review: a read of the codebase covering architecture, dependency state, known issues, and security posture. This gives your assigned engineer enough context to respond from day one. Most clients with an inherited codebase request the full code audit first, which is credited toward the first month's retainer.
No long-term lock-in. Retainers run month-to-month after a 2 to 4 week onboarding period. Onboarding is when the engineer reviews the code, sets up monitoring, and establishes the dependency baseline. After that, you can pause or cancel with 30 days written notice.
Five sections: (1) Issues resolved with timestamps and root cause notes, (2) Dependency updates applied, packages and versions listed, (3) Security advisories reviewed and actions taken, (4) Performance metrics compared to the previous month, (5) Recommended actions for next month with estimated effort. Delivered as a PDF and a shared document. Every claim links to the supporting commit hash in the git history.
The SLA commitments apply regardless of which engineer responds. Every engagement has a designated secondary engineer who has reviewed the same codebase documentation and carries the runbook. Planned absences are communicated 2 weeks in advance. The secondary engineer is briefed before any leave period begins.
Application support services are built for specific situations. Here is how to know if yours is one of them.
The situations below on the left are exactly what the maintenance retainer handles. The situations on the right call for a different kind of engagement.
Not sure which side you're on? Tell us your situation. We'll be direct.
Good fit
Live application in production with real users
Maintenance protects running software. Not software still under construction.
No in-house engineer dedicated to maintenance
The retainer fills the capacity gap without a full-time hire.
A growing backlog of deferred updates, patches, or fixes
The retainer includes a catch-up sprint for existing debt in the first month.
A past outage, breach, or critical CVE that went undetected
A real incident shows exactly what breaks when monitoring is not in place.
Not the right fit
Application still in active development — no live users yet
Start with a dedicated build team. Come back to maintenance after launch.
You need new features, not upkeep
Staff augmentation or a feature-development engagement is the better fit.
Tell us your application. Get a scoped proposal in 24 hours.
No commitment. No pitch. Describe your application, your current maintenance situation, and what concerns you most. We scope the right software maintenance and support retainer — and tell you the exact monthly cost — before you decide anything.
Submit your application brief
Stack, hosting, current maintenance situation, and the last incident you wish had been caught earlier.
Scope and pricing proposal, in writing, within 24 hours
Exactly what is included, the monthly cost, and the SLA commitments. No verbal estimates.
Technical onboarding within 1 week of sign-off
Codebase review, monitoring setup, dependency baseline. SLA clock goes live.
Brief received.
Your software maintenance and support retainer proposal arrives within 24 hours. The engineer assigned to your account reads your application brief before the proposal is written — not after.