Most retainers price availability in hours and measure delivery in tickets closed. That's a reasonable way to buy support and a poor way to keep a site healthy, because nothing in the arrangement makes anyone responsible for whether the site is structurally better than it was. We do the support work too. The difference is that we also produce a quarterly read on the system's condition and treat fixing it as part of the engagement rather than a separate project.

Not in the staff-augmentation sense. If what you need is capacity — a pod that absorbs a volume of tickets and functions as headcount you didn't hire — there are agencies built for that, and some of them are very good at it. We're built around a smaller group that knows your system deeply and is accountable for its condition. Those are different products and it's worth being honest about which one you're shopping for.

That's a legitimate need and we do it. Be aware you'll be paying partly for capability you're not using, and a capacity-focused agency will likely be cheaper. If break-fix is genuinely the whole scope and will stay that way, we'll say so.

It depends on the size of the surface, publishing volume, how many teams and brands are involved, and whether your team operates the system or we do. The largest variable is the state of what exists — maintaining a site built as a system costs less than maintaining one built as a pile of pages, because half the work is otherwise remediation.

Ordinary requests move in days. Anything broken gets triaged the same day. We work in whatever channel your team already uses rather than asking you to file tickets somewhere new. We'll agree response expectations in writing at the start rather than leaving it to goodwill.

Yes, and for most clients that's the point. The system is built so routine pages don't require us. Some clients still prefer we handle everything, which is fine — what matters is that the capability exists, so the choice is yours rather than forced.

A new site is when drift starts, not when it's absent. The first two quarters after launch are when one-off patterns get introduced fastest, because the campaigns start before anyone has established what the system absorbs and what it rejects. Catching that early is far cheaper than correcting it later.

The routine work shrinks and the oversight work grows. Someone has to decide what agents can publish unreviewed, sample what they produce, and adjust as the brand and the site change. That's a governance job, and it's where maintenance is heading. An agency priced by the hour has a structural problem with that shift. We don't.