Not "support." A retainer with a named pod — strategy, design, engineering — sharing your roadmap, your release calendar, and your priorities every month.
A team, not a queue.
Most agencies sell support as tickets and SLAs — a queue you submit work into and hope something useful comes back. That's not what this is.
Embedded Platform Care means a named team is on your account every month. They know your stack, your roadmap, your stakeholders, and the history of why things are the way they are. When something breaks, they already know where to look. When something needs to be built, they already know what it should connect to.
It's the difference between renting a help desk and hiring a team.
Every Care retainer — Care, Care + Growth, or Embedded Team — comes with the same core. What changes between tiers is the depth, the cadence, and how many hours of build work are baked in.
Every line above is in every tier. The tier you choose determines how much pod time and build capacity sits behind those lines.
Move up a tier when the roadmap moves up a tier. Move down when the platform settles into steady-state. Tier change is a conversation, not a contract negotiation.
For a single platform that needs to stay healthy.
Hosting oversight, security patches, minor fixes, monthly health reporting, and roughly ten build hours every month for the small enhancements that always need to happen.
For a complex platform with an active roadmap.
Everything in Care, plus roughly thirty build hours per month, quarterly planning sessions, and a dedicated PM coordinating the work. Enough capacity to actually move the roadmap forward without bouncing in and out of sprint engagements.
For multi-region or mission-critical platforms.
Everything in Care + Growth, plus roughly eighty build hours per month, a named pod working at weekly cadence, and on-call coverage. What running a platform looks like when "the website" is actually four regional sites, three integrations, and a donation engine — and it can't go down.
No surprise invoices. No new SOW.
Build hours are generous, but real platforms throw curveballs. When a request needs more capacity than the retainer covers, two things happen — both before any work starts.
Before any work starts, you'll know whether it fits inside the month or needs more. No discovery debt, no "we'll figure it out as we go."
Same team, defined scope, fixed price — running alongside the retainer, not replacing it. The retainer keeps running; the sprint ships and closes.
We work in pods, and the Care pod has its own rhythm — four cadences stacked on top of each other so nothing slips through and nothing waits.
Intake triage and incident response. Real people on your queue, not a ticket system you submit to and wait.
Team sync on your account — plus a status touchpoint with you at the higher tiers. The pod stays current on your business between major check-ins.
Performance, security, accessibility, integration health, build hours summary, what shipped, and what's next — in one document.
A working session with you and your stakeholders. What's the next ninety days — and what do we deprioritize to make room?
The team you meet in the kickoff is the team you work with every month. Turnover happens, but you're not handed off to a new account every quarter.
To keep retainers honest, some things are explicitly out of scope. If something walks in that doesn't fit, we tell you — we don't quietly absorb it and run out of capacity for the work you actually hired us for.
Saying no protects the work. Honest scope is the only way a retainer stays useful in month eighteen, not just month two.
Both moved into Care. Neither has needed to leave.
We run Rubbermaid Commercial's web presence across four regions on an Embedded Team retainer — sites, integrations, and the release calendar that keeps them in step.
We're the digital team behind USA for UNHCR's donation infrastructure, on a multi-year engagement that's grown with their needs — through every donation peak, integration shift, and campaign push.
Both started with a two-week audit. Both stayed because the work kept being worth the retainer.
How to start
A two-week audit gives both sides a clear-eyed view of the platform before we sign a retainer. It de-risks the engagement for you and gives us the context to deliver real value from month one. If you already know you want a retainer, we can skip the audit and go straight to scoping — but the Health Check is usually the smarter first step.