Once it's stable,
keep senior engineers on the team.
A rescue fixes what's broken today. A retainer stops the next thing from breaking. You get the same senior engineers who stabilized the app, on call for feature work, code review, and incident response, without hiring a full-time team you're not ready for yet.
You're stable. You're not staffed to stay that way.
- The last feature you shipped quietly broke something else, and nobody caught it before customers did.
- Nobody senior owns the codebase full-time, so every change is a small gamble.
- You're scared to ship without someone senior reviewing it first, but you don't have that person on staff.
- You want to keep building but aren't ready to hire, onboard, and manage a full-time engineering team.
- Security and infrastructure got fixed once, but nothing's been checked since.
The same senior team, on retainer instead of a one-time engagement.
Scope the retainer
Agree on a monthly hour allocation based on your roadmap, codebase size, and how much ongoing maintenance the app needs.
Feature development
Senior engineers pick up roadmap items directly, instead of a solo founder or junior team carrying it alone.
Code review on every change
Every pull request gets a senior review before it ships, catching the class of mistake AI tools make silently.
Continuous security monitoring
Ongoing scanning for the same failure modes the original audit checked for, so new code doesn't reopen old risks.
Monthly architecture check-in
A recurring review of what's been built, what's coming, and where technical debt is starting to accumulate.
On-call incident response
Priority response when something breaks in production, so you're not debugging a live outage alone.
A senior team without a full-time headcount.
- Dedicated senior engineering hours. Scoped monthly to your actual roadmap, not a generic package.
- Monthly reporting. What shipped, what was reviewed, and what's coming next.
- Priority response for production incidents. You're not alone when something breaks.
- Continuous security scanning. The audit doesn't stop being relevant the day it's delivered.
- Roadmap and planning support. A second senior opinion on what to build next and how.
A monthly retainer, scoped to your app.
Typically follows a Rescue & Harden or Rebuild & Takeover engagement, though it doesn't have to.
Your fractional senior team, monthly. Scoped to your codebase and roadmap, cancel anytime.
If we haven't worked in your codebase yet, a short diagnostic gets us oriented before the retainer starts.
See the full pricing breakdown for every service.
If any of this sounds like you.
Composite personas, written to describe who this is for. Not real clients, and not real messages.
"It's stable now. I don't want to end up back here."
You've seen what happens without senior eyes on the codebase. Keep the same team that fixed it, so it stays fixed.
"We need senior engineering, but not a full team yet."
You're past the MVP stage but not ready to hire a CTO and a team. A retainer gets you the seniority without the headcount.
Exactly what is in scope, and exactly what is not.
The same spec block sits on every service page, so you can compare them line for line. What is excluded matters as much as what is included, because that is where scope disputes come from.
- A named, agreed allocation of senior engineering capacity each month, set in the retainer rather than left vague.
- Feature development on a stable base, prioritized with you rather than assigned to us.
- Code review on every change, including changes you or your own team make, which is where most regressions get caught.
- Continuous security scanning, with dependency and secret checks running rather than remembered.
- A monthly architecture check-in: what is drifting, what is about to become a problem, what can safely be left alone.
- Priority incident response on an agreed channel, with a response expectation written into the retainer.
- Monthly written reporting on what shipped, what was found, and what is queued.
- Roadmap and planning support, including telling you when a planned feature is more expensive than it looks.
- Unlimited capacity. The retainer is a defined allocation. Work beyond it is quoted, not silently absorbed and then silently dropped.
- A full rescue or rebuild. If the retainer starts on a codebase that needs one, we scope that first rather than paying for it a month at a time.
- 24/7 follow-the-sun on-call as a default. Extended coverage can be agreed and priced explicitly; we will not imply it and then miss it.
- Any certification. We assess, harden and document. No engineering firm can issue a SOC 2 report or certify HIPAA compliance.
- Product management, design or QA staffing. We engineer.
- A lock-in period. The retainer is month to month, because a retainer that needs a contract to survive is not working.
A dedicated senior engineering allocation, a monthly written report on what shipped and what was found, priority incident response on an agreed channel, continuous security scanning, and a standing architecture check-in. Everything stays in infrastructure and repositories you own, so leaving costs you nothing but notice.
Month to month, starting from an agreed date. New to us, we run a short diagnostic first so the first month is spent building rather than reading.
Senior engineers only, with production experience that predates the current generation of AI tooling, and the same engineers month to month rather than whoever is free. No junior pool, no offshore handoff, no account manager in between.
- The monthly allocation you actually need, which the first month usually clarifies more honestly than a planning document.
- Response expectations. Faster incident response costs more because it reserves capacity that cannot then be spent elsewhere.
- System size and how many separate services are under care.
- Data sensitivity, which raises the rigor required on every change.
- Whether the codebase arrived stable. A retainer running on an unrescued codebase spends its capacity firefighting, which is the most expensive way to buy engineering.
A scope call establishes what the system needs monthly and what response expectation is realistic. If we have not worked on the codebase before, a short diagnostic comes first. You get the allocation, the response terms and the price in writing, month to month, with no lock-in.
What founders ask about the retainer.
Do I need to have gone through a rescue first?
Usually, since it means we already know the codebase. It's not strictly required. If your app is already stable and secure, we can start a retainer after a shorter assessment call instead of a full diagnostic.
How many hours do I get?
Retainer hours are scoped to your actual roadmap and codebase size, not a generic package. We agree on a monthly allocation upfront so there's no ambiguity about what's covered.
Can I cancel?
Yes. It's a month-to-month retainer with no long-term lock-in beyond the current billing month.
What's the difference between this and just hiring someone?
You get senior engineers immediately, without a hiring process, at a fraction of the cost of a full-time senior hire, and with the flexibility to scale hours up or down as your roadmap changes.
How fast do you respond to production incidents?
Retainer clients get priority response for production incidents, ahead of new-engagement work. Exact response-time targets are set in the retainer agreement based on your app's criticality.
Keep the team that fixed it.
Talk to a senior engineer about what a monthly retainer would actually look like for your app. No sales engineer, no junior.