Your production app.
One named engineer.
Zero maintenance debt.
Bug fixes triaged within 30 minutes. Security patches deployed within 48 hours of a CVE. Dependencies audited weekly. Releases coordinated so Friday deployments stop being a gamble. One retainer. One engineer who knows your code. Proposal in 24 hours.
Active Service Agreement
This is a sample scope. Your retainer is built around your specific application and stack.
Your commit history
tells the truth.
Here are both versions.
"We hadn't touched our dependencies in 14 months. The audit found 6 high-severity CVEs live in production. None of them showed in monitoring. We just weren't looking."
Engineering lead, e-commerce company — shared during Redefine onboarding
Configure your maintenance
scope before you
talk to anyone.
Pick your application type, coverage hours, and the services you need. The scope card builds as you go. No discovery call required. Send the result directly as your project brief.
Four services. One
retainer. Everything handled
before you ask.
Every bug classified. Every fix timestamped.
Report a bug through any channel — email, Slack, or your issue tracker. The engineer triages it within 30 minutes. Severity maps to your SLA window. The fix ships within the window. You get a resolution note: what changed, the root cause, and how we prevented recurrence.
- P1 bugs triaged within 30 minutes of report
- Root cause documented, not just patched
- Monthly bug pattern report identifies what to fix upstream
CVEs patched in 48 hours. Not after a breach.
Security advisories update daily. When a CVE hits a dependency in your stack, the engineer researches the patch, tests it in staging, and deploys it within 48 hours. You receive a written advisory: what was exposed, what was applied, and the risk level.
- CVE monitoring across your full dependency tree
- Every patch tested in staging before production
- Written advisory per patch: exposure, fix, and risk rating
A written record of every change made to your software this month.
Every retainer includes a monthly report: bugs fixed, patches applied, packages updated, and performance shifts measured. When a new team member joins or you need to switch vendors, the entire maintenance history travels with the report archive.
Weekly audit. Monthly update sprint. No outdated packages accumulate.
We audit dependencies every week. Updates that need testing batch into a monthly sprint so your app never builds up a dangerous backlog of stale packages.
Baselines measured at onboarding. Alerts fire before users notice.
We measure performance baselines for your key pages and API endpoints during onboarding. When response times or error rates drift past the threshold, the engineer investigates before a user ever submits a complaint.
A Shopify maintenance retainer
that turned four underperforming
channels into active growth
engines.
Core Pickleball
Shopify E-Commerce — Sports and Fitness
Core Pickleball needed ongoing improvements to navigation, homepage structure, and product page engagement to support sustainable growth from their Shopify store.
Email campaigns ran manually and missed timing. No loyalty program existed to retain buyers after the first order. SEO and reviews lagged, reducing search visibility and buyer trust. Without a structured retainer, every fix required a new brief, a new scope, and a new negotiation. Improvements accumulated on a list instead of getting shipped.
Every improvement got treated as a new project. Nothing was maintained between engagements. The business paid for the same work twice: once to fix it, once to re-explain it.
Navigation changes improved conversion across product pages. Loyalty program implementation drove repeat purchases from existing customers. Automated email sequences replaced manual sends and recaptured revenue from dormant buyers. SEO improvements increased organic search visibility.
A single retainer replaced four separate project engagements and delivered continuous improvement across every growth channel.
Four things that separate a Redefine maintenance retainer
from a standard support contract.
What CTOs and operations leads ask before signing a maintenance retainer.
Maintenance keeps deployed software healthy. That means security patches, dependency updates, bug triage, and performance monitoring. It does not touch the product roadmap. Ongoing development adds new features. Both can run at the same time under separate scopes and budgets. Some clients run a maintenance retainer alongside a dedicated development team to keep these concerns separate.
Yes. Every new retainer starts with a technical onboarding review: a read of the codebase covering architecture, dependency state, known issues, and security posture. This gives the engineer the context to respond on day one. Most clients with a new-to-us codebase start with a full code audit, which credits toward the first month's retainer. The audit sets the baseline. The retainer maintains it.
Month-to-month after the initial onboarding period. Onboarding runs two to four weeks depending on codebase complexity. The engineer reads the code, sets up monitoring, and establishes the dependency baseline during that window. After onboarding, you can pause or cancel with 30 days written notice. No long-term contracts. No lock-in clauses.
The report covers five sections. First: issues resolved with timestamps and root cause notes. Second: dependency updates applied with package names and versions. Third: security advisories reviewed and actions taken. Fourth: performance metrics compared to last month's baseline. Fifth: recommended actions for next month with effort estimates. The report delivers as a PDF and a shared document. Every claim links to a commit hash so you can verify the work in your git history.
Every engagement has a designated secondary engineer who has reviewed the same codebase documentation and holds the response playbook. They respond within the P1 SLA window. Planned absences are communicated two weeks ahead, and the secondary engineer is explicitly briefed before the primary goes offline. The SLA commitments hold regardless of which engineer responds.
This retainer fits some situations well. Here is how to tell.
The good-fit situations below describe what this retainer is built for. The right-side situations point toward a different engagement type.
Not sure which side you're on? Tell us your situation We will tell you honestly which path fits.
Good fit
Live application in production with real users
Maintenance protects running software. It does not build new software.
No in-house engineer dedicated to maintenance
The retainer covers the maintenance capacity your team does not have.
Technical debt from months without structured maintenance
The retainer starts with a catch-up sprint to address existing debt before the monthly cycle begins.
A past incident that exposed a security or dependency gap
One incident is usually enough to show what structured monitoring would have prevented.
Not the right fit
Application under active development with no live users yet
The right fit here is a dedicated build team, not a maintenance retainer.
Your main need is new features, not stability
Staff augmentation or a product engineering engagement is a better match.
Describe your application. Get a written proposal in 24 hours.
No commitment. No pitch. Describe your stack, your current maintenance situation, and your biggest concern. We scope the right retainer and send the monthly cost in writing before you make any decision.
Submit your application brief
Stack, hosting environment, current maintenance gaps, and your last major incident.
Written scope and pricing proposal within 24 hours
Exactly what is covered, the monthly cost, and every SLA commitment — in a document you can share with your team.
Active coverage within 1 week of your sign-off
Codebase review complete. Monitoring live. Dependency baseline set. Your SLA is active from day one.
Your team spends under 1 hour per week: one async priority update and a monthly maintenance review call. We handle the rest.
No commitment. No pitch. · Proposal in 24 hours · Coverage starts in 1 week
Your brief is in.
Your maintenance retainer proposal arrives within 24 hours. The engineer assigned to your account reads your brief before writing a word of the proposal. Expect a scoped document with line-item costs and SLA commitments.