The Retainer
Models move. Yours should not.
Automation is not a project that finishes. Providers retire models, upstream APIs change their schema without telling you, and quality drifts quietly for weeks before anybody notices. The Retainer is the answer to the only question that matters six months after launch: is it still working, and who would know?
- Time
- Month to month, 30 days notice either way
- Terms
- Monthly30 days notice. No lock-in, rate held
Steady state
What is being watched.
What is actually being watched once you are live. The quarterly read is one page.
Included
Everything you keep.
- 01
Monitoring and someone who answers
Alerting on failure, on cost spikes, and on upstream schema changes. A named response time, and a human who answers it rather than a queue.
- 02
Model deprecation migrations
When a provider retires the model you are on, we move you, and the eval suite proves the new one is no worse. Included, not quoted.
- 03
Drift watch
The eval suite runs on a schedule. You get the trend, not just a green tick, so slow degradation shows up as a line going down.
- 04
One new workflow a quarter
Small scope, inside the fee. The compounding is the point: the second workflow is cheaper than the first because the plumbing already exists.
- 05
A quarterly read
What it saved, what it cost to run, what broke, and what we would do next. One page.
Do this if
- You have something in production and no internal owner for it
- You want the next few workflows without re-scoping a project each time
- You would rather find out about drift from us than from a customer
Do not, if
- You have an engineering team who want to own it. Take the runbooks and go, with our blessing
- Nothing is in production yet
The Retainer / questions
What people actually ask.
Is there a minimum term?
No. Month to month, 30 days notice from either side, rate held for the engagement. If you stop, you keep everything, because it was always in your repository.
What is not included?
Third-party software and model API costs, which sit on your own accounts and stay yours. A new system rather than a new workflow is quoted separately.
What does your team still do by hand?
Thirty minutes. No deck. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need us, and that is a short call.
Book thirty minutes3 engagements at a time