Same engineers, less intensity. The cost scales down when you stabilize, scales up when something demands attention.
We own the pager. Named SLOs. Postmortems with action.
Small, frequent, reversible.
A written narrative of the system every 13 weeks.
Always available; never punitive.
Operate doesn’t mean static. The deliverable is a system that gets better quarter over quarter — not one that just doesn’t break.
Per service: availability target, latency target, error budget, alerting thresholds. Visible to your leadership.
Monthly written report: peak headroom, growth trajectory, cost-per-customer trend, optimization PRs shipped.
Every incident: timeline, customer impact, contributing factors, action items, follow-through status. Public to your engineering org.
Quarterly written document covering shipped work, learned lessons, architecture deltas, and roadmap. Reads like a magazine, not a status report.
Quarterly. Real restore from real backups under timed conditions. Results published. Improvement plan from results.
Annual pen-test with diff against prior year. 1-page summary to leadership; full report to engineering.
Same engineers, different scope of responsibility. Most engagements start at Standard and adjust over the first quarter.
Operate & evolve is run on a 13-week cycle. Each quarter ends with a written narrative; each starts with a planning brief.
Plan the quarter: feature backlog, technical debt items, infrastructure projects. Signed by us, your eng leadership, and product.
Continuous delivery, on-call, incident response, weekly delivery cadence. Monthly written status to leadership.
Written narrative: shipped, broke, learned, changed. DR drill results. Capacity + cost trend. Roadmap for next quarter.
Annual: pen-test with diff, architecture re-review against business reality, contract renewal or off-ramp discussion in the open.
If something isn’t answered here, ask in your intro email — we keep this list short on purpose.
Yes — about a third of our Operate engagements start that way. We do a 4-week ramp where we shadow the existing operation, then take over with a written plan.
We flag it in the first quarterly review with a written rework proposal. You decide whether to take it on (potentially with an upgrade to Build engagement) or live with the constraint.
After 12 months, yes. Transfer fee that credits against future engagements with us. We’d rather lose someone you really want than fight to keep them.
On the Operate + evolve tier, yes — quarterly feature commitments in writing. On lower tiers, we commit to the operating SLA and feature work is best-effort with the spare capacity.
Send a paragraph about the problem. We’ll come back inside 48 hours with a written take — team shape, cost envelope, riskiest assumptions.