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Packages

Ways in, and ways to keep it running — with the price on the door

Three fixed-scope builds and two kinds of maintenance retainer. Fixed scope, fixed price, written down before anything starts. Publishing the numbers is deliberate: it saves you a call if the budget is not there, and it means the scope conversation is about what gets built rather than what it might cost.

Jump to maintenance plans

  • AI Readiness Audit

    You suspect there is a case but cannot size it yet

    $2,400fixed · 2 weeks

    We map the processes, test whether your systems can actually be integrated, and hand you a written build plan. Including the answer that you should not build.

    • Process mapping across the team that feels the pain
    • A real integration test against your API or a sandbox
    • A ranked shortlist with hours and cost against each process
    • A written build plan you can take to any vendor
    • A 60-minute walkthrough of the findings
    What is in AI Readiness Audit

  • Agent Pilot

    Most chosen

    You know the process. You need it proven on live data

    $6,500from · 4–6 weeks

    One process, end to end, against your real systems — with scoped permissions, an approval queue on every write, and a measured before-and-after.

    • One agent, one process, running on live data
    • Connectors for the systems that process touches
    • Scoped permissions and a reviewed write queue
    • Audit logging from the first day, not retrofitted
    • A measured result you can take to a board
    • Full source code, documented, in your repository
    What is in Agent Pilot

  • Access Layer

    The pilot worked and you want the foundation built properly

    $8,000from · 5–8 weeks

    The permissioned layer between all of your systems and any model — so the second, third and fourth agent take weeks rather than months.

    • Connectors across the systems you name
    • Per-system, per-operation permission model
    • Central approval queue with named reviewers
    • Full audit trail, exportable
    • Documentation your team can extend from
    • Handover and a maintenance path that does not need us
    What is in Access Layer

Choosing

Which one, in one sentence each

Most people start with the audit, because its fee comes off whatever gets built afterwards — which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether to build at all.

You cannot size it yet
Start with the AI Readiness Audit. Two weeks, a ranked shortlist and a build plan you own — including the answer that you should not build.
You know the process
Take the Agent Pilot. One process, live data, a measured agreement rate against the people doing it today.
One worked, three more are coming
Build the Access Layer, so the second and third agents are weeks of work rather than another integration project.

Maintenance

Keeping it running, after it is built

A build ends with handover — your repository, your infrastructure, your keys. A retainer afterwards is a separate decision, and it should be, because software you cannot leave is not software you own. Two shapes: care plans for CMS websites, and an engineering retainer for custom systems and agents.

Website care plans

  • Basic

    A site that has to stay up, secure and current

    6 months
    $480$80/month
    12 months
    $860$72/month

    The floor beneath a business website: it stays patched, it stays backed up, and somebody notices before your customers do.

    • Core, theme and plugin updates, applied on a staging copy first
    • Malware scanning and removal, with the entry point closed afterwards
    • Off-site backups, and a restore we have actually tested
    • Uptime monitoring with an alert to us, not only to you
    • Technical support by email, answered within two business days
    • A monthly note saying what was updated and what broke
    Ask about Basic

  • Standard

    A site that changes — events, pages, campaigns

    6 months
    $900$150/month
    12 months
    $1,600$133/month

    Everything in Basic, plus a person who makes the changes you would otherwise queue up and never get to.

    Everything in Basic, plus

    • Regular content updates — copy, images, pages, PDFs
    • Event and listing updates as they change
    • On-page SEO maintenance: titles, meta, internal links, redirects
    • Broken link and Core Web Vitals checks each month
    • Support answered within one business day
    • A monthly report with search performance alongside the work log
    Ask about Standard

  • Premium

    The site is a channel, and somebody is accountable for it

    6 months
    $1,800$300/month
    12 months
    $3,200$267/month

    Everything in Standard, plus published writing and development time reserved each month for the small builds that never get scheduled.

    Everything in Standard, plus

    • Two blog posts a month, researched, written and published
    • Priority development time for small builds and fixes
    • Conversion and analytics review each quarter, with recommendations
    • Same-business-day support response
    • A named engineer who already knows the codebase
    Ask about Premium

Plans are bought for the whole term. The twelve-month price is lower per month than the six-month one — that is the only thing the term changes.

Engineering retainer

Custom software, apps and AI agents

$1,200per month, from

A retainer for a system that has users and consequences — the platform we built you, the app in both stores, or the agent now writing to your ERP. What it costs depends on what is under it: how many integrations, how much traffic, how quickly a failure has to be answered. So we publish a floor and set the figure after a scoping call, rather than quoting a number we would have to renegotiate in month two.

What sets the figure

  • How many systems it integrates with, and how stable their APIs are
  • Traffic, run volume, and how much of it is model calls
  • How fast a failure has to be answered, and whether that includes nights
  • Whether you want reserved development hours on top of keeping it running
Book a scoping call

  • Monitoring that pages a person

    Uptime, error rates, queue depth and — for agents — per-run cost and the approval-queue backlog. Thresholds agreed with you, alerts routed to an engineer who can act on them rather than to a dashboard nobody opens.

  • Dependency and model upkeep

    Security patches, framework upgrades, and the one that catches AI systems out: model deprecations. A provider retiring a model is a scheduled migration when somebody is watching for it and an outage when nobody is.

  • Store and platform compliance

    Apple and Google change their requirements on their own schedule, and an app that is not maintained eventually stops being downloadable. Same for SDK minimums and OS releases.

  • Agent accuracy review

    For anything with a model in it: sampled outputs checked against what a person would have decided, the approval-rate trend, and the prompt or scope changes that follow. This is how a category earns its way to unattended — or gets pulled back.

  • Bug fixes inside an agreed response time

    Severity levels defined in the agreement, with a target for each. We would rather commit to a number we can hold than promise “fast”.

  • A named engineer and a monthly report

    Someone who already knows the codebase, so a fix does not start with a week of reading. The report says what ran, what broke, what was changed and what we think is coming.

Questions

Asked before every retainer

How much does website maintenance cost?
Website care plans run from $480 for six months ($80 a month) on Basic to $3,200 for twelve months ($267 a month) on Premium. The twelve-month term is cheaper per month than the six-month one. Maintenance for custom software, apps and AI agents starts at $1,200 a month, with the fixed figure set after a scoping call.
Do you maintain software you did not build?
Often, yes — but we start with a paid handover review rather than a retainer, because taking on a codebase we have not read is how a retainer turns into a rescue. The review tells us both whether a retainer is sensible and at what figure.
What does maintenance mean for an AI agent specifically?
Three things ordinary software maintenance does not cover: watching per-run cost so a quiet change in usage does not become a quiet change in your bill, sampling the agent’s output against what a person would have decided, and handling model deprecations as planned migrations. A model being retired by its provider is the most common way an unmaintained agent stops working.
Can I cancel?
Care plans are bought for a six or twelve-month term and are not pro-rated if you stop early. Software retainers run monthly after the first three months, with 30 days’ notice on either side. Everything stays in your accounts and your repository, so leaving means the work carries on without us.
Is maintenance included after a build?
No, and we do not bundle it in quietly. A build ends with handover: your repository, your infrastructure, your keys, documented. A retainer afterwards is a decision you make separately, which is the point — it should be something you choose rather than something you are locked into.

Tell us which process is costing you.

Thirty minutes, no preparation, no deck. You describe what keeps going wrong and we tell you whether AI is the answer — including when it is not.

Book a discovery callOr start with the audit

Prefer email? contact@devs-core.com