Monitoring and alerting
We set up or take over your alarms and dashboards, then act on what they say. Alerts that nobody responds to get fixed or removed.
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Fixed price · Fixed scope
DevOps Retainer
Most small teams do not need a full-time DevOps hire. They need someone who already knows their stack to handle the monitoring, patching and 3am problems. That is this: a fixed monthly block of senior time, with a written runbook behind every production change.
- Starts
- Within a week
- Scope
- Fixed, in writing
- Rollback plan
- On every change
We have run production infrastructure for a US healthcare platform continuously — a Laravel application on AWS behind Cloudflare, plus the infrastructure for each new facility rollout.
This is for you if
- Your developers are doing infrastructure work instead of shipping features
- Nobody owns patching, backups or monitoring, so it quietly does not happen
- You need DevOps coverage but not a $150k hire
- You have an audit or a customer who wants to see that someone is responsible
What we do
What the $2,500 covers
Patching and upgrades
OS packages, base images, runtime versions and dependency security updates on a monthly cadence, applied in a window that suits you.
Incident response
When production breaks we join, diagnose and fix it, then write up what happened and what stops it recurring.
CI/CD and infrastructure changes
Pipeline fixes, new environments, scaling changes, SSL renewals, DNS, and the steady stream of small infra work that otherwise waits weeks.
Cost and capacity review
A monthly look at what you are spending and what you are about to outgrow, with recommendations in plain numbers.
What you get
- 20 hours of senior engineering time each month
- Written runbook for every production change, before it is made
- Monthly report: what we did, what broke, what it cost, what to do next
- A named engineer who knows your system, not a ticket queue
- Response within one business day; same-day for production-down
Not included
- Feature development (we quote that as project work)
- 24/7 follow-the-sun paging — our coverage overlaps US Eastern and Central European business hours
- Unused hours do not roll over, which keeps the price honest for both sides
Anything outside this list is quoted before we start it, never invoiced afterwards.
Timeline
How it runs, start to finish
Week 1 — take over
We document what you have, get access, and write down how your system actually works. Most clients learn something about their own infrastructure here.
Week 2 — stabilise
The gaps that would cause the next incident get closed first: backups, alarms, expiring certificates, unpatched hosts.
Month 1 onward — run it
Steady cadence: patching, monitoring, small changes, incident response, and a monthly report you can forward to anyone who asks.
Any month — leave
Cancel with 30 days' notice. The runbooks and documentation are yours and stay yours.
Questions we always get
What if we need more than 20 hours in a month?
Extra hours are billed at $40/hour, agreed in advance. If you are consistently over, we will tell you and suggest a bigger block rather than quietly invoicing more.
Do you work with our existing team?
Yes, that is the normal arrangement. We join your Slack, your ticket tool and your on-call rotation if you have one.
What stacks do you support?
AWS with Node.js, NestJS, Laravel/PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Docker, Kubernetes and nginx. If your stack is outside that, say so and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right team.
Start your DevOps Retainer
Book a 20-minute call. Bring your AWS account, your compliance dashboard or your database version, and we will tell you what we would do and what it costs — on the call, not in a proposal two weeks later.
See the case studies behind this work →