Retainers / Support & Maintenance
Your store changes even when you don't touch it.
Shopify ships platform releases. Apps auto-update. Someone in marketing uploads a 4 MB hero image. A tag gets renamed and a flow quietly stops firing. None of it announces itself — you find out from a revenue dip six weeks later, and then spend a fortnight working out which of the twelve changes caused it.
- What it is
- An ongoing monthly maintenance retainer for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores: platform and app updates tested on staging before they reach production, bugs fixed to an agreed response time, and monitoring that surfaces silent failures.
- Who it's for
- Brands trading on Shopify who have no in-house developer, or who have one and don't want them spending the week on platform housekeeping. Works whether or not we built the store.
- What's included
- Staging environment kept in sync · platform release testing · app update review · bug fixes to SLA · uptime and error monitoring · redirect and canonical audits · monthly written report.
- Response times
- Store down: 2 hours. Checkout or payment broken: 4 hours. Functional bug: 1 business day. Cosmetic: 3 business days. Business hours, US Pacific.
- What's not included
- New feature development, redesigns and migrations are projects, not maintenance. We quote those separately or run them through a development retainer.
- Investment
- From $2,500 per month. This is the Essential tier. Three-month initial term, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice.
- Who does the work
- A named senior engineer who knows your codebase. Not a rotating pool, not an offshore team, not an account manager relaying messages.
The failure mode
The bugs that cost you money don't announce themselves.
An outage is easy — everyone knows within minutes. The expensive failures are the quiet ones, running for weeks while the store looks completely fine.
Silent failures we find on new retainers
Every one of these was live on a store whose owner thought it was fine
- A checkout extension broken by a platform release, dropping a payment method nobody had tested since launch
- An abandoned-cart flow stopped firing because a product tag was renamed in a catalogue tidy-up
- Purchase events firing twice after an app install, inflating reported ROAS and misleading every bidding decision
- A redirect chain three hops deep after a collection restructure, leaking authority at every hop
- Structured data invalidated by a theme edit, quietly removing rich results
- An uninstalled app leaving its scripts behind, still loading on every page months later
What the retainer does about it
The same six months, monitored
- Platform releases tested on staging against your real theme before they reach customers
- Key flows and events monitored — a stopped flow raises an alert, not a quarterly surprise
- Event integrity checked, so duplicates are caught before they corrupt a month of bidding
- Redirects and canonicals audited on a cycle, chains collapsed to a single hop
- Structured data validated after every deploy
- App inventory reviewed — dead scripts removed, not just the app uninstalled
Response times
An SLA you can hold us to.
Response means a human engineer has picked it up and told you what's happening — not an automated ticket acknowledgement.
| Severity | What it means | Response | Target fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEV-1 | Store down or checkout failing. Customers cannot buy. | 2 hours | Same day, worked continuously |
| SEV-2 | A payment method, key page or integration is broken. Revenue is degraded. | 4 hours | 1 business day |
| SEV-3 | A functional bug. Something works incorrectly but the store trades. | 1 business day | 3 business days |
| SEV-4 | Cosmetic or minor. Visual inconsistency, non-blocking. | 3 business days | Next maintenance window |
Business hours are 9am–6pm US Pacific, Monday to Friday. SEV-1 is covered outside those hours on the Partner tier. Response times tighten by tier — same-business-day across all severities on Growth, priority handling on Partner.
What a month looks like
Not just waiting for something to break.
Uptime, error rates, checkout completion, key flow firing and Core Web Vitals reviewed against last week — not just glanced at.
Every Shopify release and app update applied to staging against your real theme first. Nothing reaches production untested.
Redirects, canonicals, structured data, app inventory and dead scripts. One area goes deep each month on rotation.
What changed, what we fixed, what moved, and what we recommend next month. Sent before the call, not read out on it.
Support & Maintenance retainer
Includes the staging environment, platform release testing, SLA-backed bug fixing, monitoring, the monthly audit cycle and the written report. Bundles with any other retainer from the Growth tier.
A starting point for scoping rather than a quote — the final number depends on store complexity, app count, location count and response time. Three-month initial term, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice.
Questions we get
Straight answers.
What counts as maintenance and what's a project?
Maintenance is keeping what exists working: fixing bugs, testing platform and app updates, monitoring, and the audit cycle. A project is anything that adds something new — a feature, a redesign, a migration, a new integration. We're strict about the line because the alternative is a retainer that quietly becomes unpaid development and then gets delivered badly. New work is quoted separately, or runs through a development retainer.
Do you maintain stores you didn't build?
Yes, and that's most of them. We start with an audit of the existing code so we're working from the real state of the theme rather than assumptions — app inventory, script bloat, event integrity, redirect health. That audit usually produces the first month's fix list on its own.
What happens if nothing breaks this month?
The proactive work still happens — platform testing, the audit cycle, monitoring, the report. That's the majority of the value and it's why this isn't sold as a block of hours. A quiet month means the preventative work is doing its job, not that you overpaid.
Can we call you when the store goes down at 2am?
On the Partner tier, yes — SEV-1 is covered outside business hours. On Essential and Growth, response times run 9am–6pm US Pacific, Monday to Friday. We'd rather tell you that plainly than sell 24/7 cover we'd staff badly.
Is there a long contract?
Three months, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice. Three months exists because the first month is largely the audit and the backlog it produces — judging the retainer on that month alone would be judging the wrong thing.
How do we raise an issue?
Email or a shared channel, going to a named senior engineer who knows your codebase. Not a ticket queue, not an account manager relaying messages to someone else. On the Partner tier that's a direct Slack channel.
Next step
Find out what's already broken.
The free CRO and tracking audit doubles as a maintenance health check — it tells you what's silently failing on your store today, whether or not you take a retainer.
