Note /
Why not build it yourself
The frameworks are other people's software and the wiring is not a secret, so somebody minded to do it themselves can go and do it. We would rather concede that at the top than build an argument on the assumption you could not. What follows is what the price is actually set against.
Getting one running is the part that goes well
The frameworks we install are named on the front page with their origins, rather than hidden behind our own branding, and none of them belongs to us. Connecting one to a system you already run is documented work, and if your read is that you could do it yourself, that read is probably fair. It is also the part of this that behaves: you can tell whether it worked by looking at it.
What the price is set against
The retainers are priced against the cost of a security incident or a platform engineer’s salary. That principle is published on the retainer note, and it is the honest shape of the answer here: the recurring number is not measuring the build. This is not a claim that the build is trivial. It is a statement about what the money is for. A connected agent is a standing responsibility, and that is the thing being bought.
A build that works and a build that is hardened are different builds
Under the default posture an agent reaches the tools its job needs and nothing else, and actions that carry consequences wait for a person. Neither of those shows up when you test whether the thing works, because both are decisions about what it may not do. The posture your deployment runs under is written into the handover document you sign, so it is a decision on the record rather than whatever the defaults happened to be on the day. A deployment somebody wants run with the guardrails off is refused outright, at any price, which is the clearest way we can say that this part is not an upsell.
The part that comes back
Your deployment is pinned to a stable version, updates are tested on staging before they are released to any customer, and they are promoted only when needed. That is a standing job rather than a task with an end, and it is what Maintain at $350 a month covers, alongside ticket support. Operate at $700 adds monitoring and a monthly review with minor config changes included, and Partner at $1,500 folds in two days of bespoke work each month and a priority queue. Build it yourself and none of that work disappears. It becomes yours, on top of whatever you built the thing to do.
Our exclusion list doubles as the job description
The published exclusions are the things we do not cover even while you are paying us. Among them: upgrades and configuration changes you start yourself, an upstream release you applied before staging sign-off, model output quality and LLM provider costs, third-party outages, data loss where the backup and recovery add-on was declined, and the consequences of prompt injection or social engineering after a signed-off posture. Read that list as work somebody has to own. Buy the service and one side of the line is ours. Build it yourself and both sides are.
When building it yourself is the right answer
If you already employ the platform engineer, you already have the person a retainer stands in for, and this is a straightforwardly worse deal for you. The businesses this is built for run between roughly ten and two hundred people without a dedicated platform engineer, and if you sit outside that, much of what follows the build is not aimed at you. If what you are building only drafts and reports rather than acting on anything, the consequences of getting it wrong are smaller, and the honest advice is to build the small thing and see. We would rather say that now than sell you an install you did not need.
If you have already built one
The useful question about something already running is what it can reach and what it can be talked into doing. A standalone security audit of an existing agent deployment is on the add-on menu at $700, and it does not require you to have bought anything else from us. Keeping what you built is a perfectly good outcome of that conversation.