IT consulting, managed support, and technical due diligence
Technical judgement on call, without a full-time hire
Ongoing technical capacity for businesses without an in-house engineering lead: maintenance, monitoring, upgrades, security hygiene, and someone to ask before decisions get made.
The problem
Between having no technical needs and being able to justify a full-time engineering hire there is a long, awkward stretch. During it, critical systems have no owner, maintenance is deferred until it becomes an incident, and significant technical decisions get made by whoever is available rather than whoever knows.
What's included
Managed maintenance
Dependency and security updates, certificate renewals, backup verification, and the upkeep that only becomes visible when it has been skipped for a year.
Technical advisory
Architecture decisions, vendor and build-versus-buy evaluations, and hiring input — available before the decision is made rather than after.
Technical due diligence
Independent review of a codebase or infrastructure you are about to acquire, invest in, or inherit, written for people who need to make a decision.
Security hygiene
Access review, secrets handling, dependency vulnerabilities, backup and restore testing, and the infrastructure answers procurement will ask for.
Inherited system rescue
Documenting and stabilising software nobody currently understands, so you have options other than a rewrite.
How we approach it
- 01
Understand the estate first
Before committing to a retainer, we document what you are actually running. Retainers that start without this turn into expensive guesswork.
- 02
Plan the month up front
We agree at the start of each month what the days go on. No open-ended time and no surprise invoices.
- 03
Fix causes, not tickets
Recurring work gets automated rather than repeated. The list of things needing us should get shorter.
- 04
Be available before decisions
The cheapest technical advice is given before the thing is built. Retainer clients get us in the conversation early.
Our position
"A good retainer should shrink over time."
If you need the same number of days from us in month twelve as in month one, we have been maintaining a dependency rather than building capability. Every retainer we run has handover built into it.
Free discovery call
Got a problem that keeps sliding to next sprint?
A free 30-minute call. Tell us what you're working on and we'll outline the best approach, a realistic timeline and an estimated budget.