Managed Services

Project-based consulting has a defined scope, fixed deliverable, and end date. Managed services is a continuous engagement: a dedicated senior team operates and evolves your platform week by week, billed on actual hours worked. Use project-based when the work has a clear end. Use managed services when you need ongoing operations, on-call support, fractional CTO capacity, or continuous platform engineering investment.

A typical managed contract includes: a named senior engineer (or team) with dedicated weekly hours, on-call coverage with defined SLAs, monthly architecture reviews, quarterly security and dependency audits, observability ownership, incident response, and weekly written status reports. Everything is billed on actual hours worked — no padding, no minimums beyond the agreed weekly commitment.

Weekly retainers based on committed senior-engineer hours, billed in arrears against actual time worked. A typical mid-market contract is 20-40 hours per week of senior engineering capacity, scaling up or down monthly with 30 days notice. There are no setup fees and no long-term lock-ins — managed services contracts are 30-day rolling agreements after an initial 90-day commitment.

For early and mid-stage companies, yes — we offer Fractional CTO engagements specifically to fill that role at a fraction of full-time cost. For larger organizations, managed services typically augments an existing platform team rather than replacing it, providing senior depth on specialized areas (AI/ML, security, blockchain) that don't justify full-time hires.

Standard managed-services SLAs: P1 (production down) acknowledgement within 1 hour 24/7, P2 (degraded) within 4 hours business hours, P3 (non-urgent) within 1 business day. For applications with stricter requirements we negotiate custom SLAs backed by service credits. Everything is documented in the contract so there is no ambiguity during incidents.