Northbound Freight
A shipment portal built over an existing transport management system, so customers can answer their own status questions.
Self-service replaces status calls
05 · Operate
Support and continuous improvement
A digital product is not finished at launch; it is only released. Dependencies age, browsers change, content grows, integrations break, and the business needs things the original scope did not include.
Our support arrangements exist to keep the thing healthy and to keep improving it. A retainer that only fixes what breaks means the product gets steadily worse in every respect except uptime.
What happens without it
Unsupported sites decline in a predictable order, and every stage is more expensive to fix than the one before.
- Updates are deferred because nobody is confident they will not break something.
- Performance drifts down release by release, unnoticed until it is bad.
- Small improvements never happen because each one needs a new quote and a new approval.
- When something breaks, nobody currently working on it understands the codebase.
- The original supplier has moved on and the documentation was never written.
- A two-year-old site now needs a rebuild that a maintained one would not have needed.
What is included
Arrangements are scoped to the product. Most combine the following.
Maintenance
Platform, dependency and security updates applied on a schedule, tested on staging before production, with a documented rollback path.
Monitoring
Uptime, error rate, performance and Core Web Vitals, certificate expiry and backup success – monitored with alerting, so problems are found by us rather than reported by your customers.
Technical support
A defined route for reporting issues, agreed response times by severity, and a named team that already knows your codebase.
Content and configuration support
Help with the changes that need a developer – new templates, structural content changes, form and integration adjustments.
Continuous development
An agreed monthly allocation for improvements: new features, refinements, and work identified by analytics or performance monitoring. This is the part that makes a retainer worth having.
Backups and recovery
Automated backups stored separately, with restores tested rather than assumed.
Reporting and planning
Regular reporting on what was done, what the monitoring shows, and what we recommend next – with a roadmap conversation rather than a ticket count.
Diagram
How we work with clients long term
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A named team, not a queue The people supporting your product are people who know it. Context is most of the value in support work, and rotating it away destroys that value.
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Proactive, not reactive Monitoring, dependency review and performance tracking mean most issues are addressed before they are noticed. A support relationship measured only in tickets closed is measuring the wrong thing.
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Improvement time is protected Retainers include allocated improvement capacity that is not consumed by maintenance. Without that protection, improvement never happens.
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Transparent reporting You see what was done, what it cost in time, and what we recommend next. No opaque monthly fee with an unexplained summary.
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No lock-in Documentation, code and infrastructure access stay yours throughout. You should stay because the work is good, not because leaving is difficult.
What an arrangement includes
- Agreed scope, response times and escalation path
- Scheduled platform, dependency and security updates
- Uptime, error, performance and backup monitoring with alerting
- Tested backup and restore procedure
- Allocated monthly development capacity
- Monthly report covering work done, monitoring and recommendations
- Quarterly review of performance, security and roadmap
- Maintained documentation
How this runs
Every engagement follows the same sequence, with a defined output at each stage and nothing proceeding on an assumption that has not been written down. Operate work sits inside that process rather than alongside it.
Common questions
Do you support sites you did not build?
Yes, after a technical review. We need to understand the codebase, dependencies and hosting before committing to response times – taking on an unknown system with an SLA attached is a promise we could not keep.
What if we only need occasional help?
Ad-hoc work is possible, with the trade-off that it is scheduled against other commitments rather than reserved. For anything commercially important, a retainer buys guaranteed availability.
How is a retainer priced?
Against a scope: the systems covered, the response times required, and the improvement capacity allocated per month. We publish no standard package because a retainer that is not scoped to the product is either overpriced or undeliverable.
Can we scale the arrangement up and down?
Yes. Requirements change – a launch period needs more capacity than a stable quarter. Adjustments are made at review points with reasonable notice on both sides.
Related services
Need a team that stays after launch?
Tell us what you are running and what it needs to keep doing. We will scope an arrangement against that, not against a package.
Or email hello@applystudio.com – we reply within one business day.