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Maintain, Operate or Partner
Each retainer tier contains the one below it, so the real question is which lines of work you want inside the monthly price and which you are happy to have quoted. Here is the ladder, read from the bottom.
The ladder itself
Maintain, $350 a month, is staging-tested updates and version pinning, with ticket support. Operate, $700 a month, is everything in Maintain plus monitoring and a monthly review, with minor config changes included. Partner, $2,000 a month, is everything in Operate plus two days of bespoke work each month, one day of carry-over, and a priority queue. The same figures, with the worked example, are on the pricing page.
What Maintain actually maintains
Your deployment is pinned to a stable framework version. Updates are tested on staging before they are released to any customer and promoted only when needed. The mirror of that is in the published exclusions: an upstream release you apply yourself, before staging sign-off, sits outside the SLA until it has been tested. Ticket support carries the published support promise: 24/7 agent-assisted, response within 24 hours guaranteed, human escalation next business day, resolution best-effort. That promise has a note of its own.
Operate moves config changes inside the line
The published exclusions say plainly that configuration changes you ask for sit outside SLA scope and are quoted as chargeable work. Operate is the tier that moves the minor ones inside: minor config changes are included, and the deployment gains monitoring and a monthly review. Anything larger than minor is still quoted as chargeable work. If you expect to keep adjusting how the agents work, this is the line that decides the tier.
Partner is for a steady stream of new work
New features and new integrations are never support tickets: they are sold from the add-on menu or quoted as bespoke work, anchored on $850 per day. Partner folds two days of bespoke work into every month and adds a priority queue. If most months bring something new to build rather than just an install to keep safe, this is the tier shaped for that rhythm.
What happens to a day you do not use
One of the two carries into the following month and expires at the end of it. So a quiet month is not simply lost: it makes the next month a three-day month. Nothing carries further than that, and nothing accumulates.
The reason for the limit is the same reason the rest of this site publishes its edges. Work banked indefinitely would eventually be asked for all at once, and a month of owed days is a promise rather than a service. One day of carry-over covers the way change work actually arrives, in lumps rather than evenly, without letting a month build up into something that cannot be delivered. If your work is lumpier than that, the honest answer is Operate plus bespoke days bought as you need them, at $700 a month and $850 a day, so a quiet month costs you nothing beyond the retainer.
What the prices are set against
The tiers are priced against the cost of a security incident or a platform engineer’s salary, never against install-only freelancers. The tiers are built for the same client as the installs, a business of roughly 10 to 200 people without a dedicated platform engineer; the retainer is the part of the service that keeps a hardened deployment hardened after the install is done.