Digital project terms, plainly defined

A strategic session is a short paid working meeting in which a business reviews its goals, customers, operations and digital systems with outside experts and leaves with a prioritized plan: what to do first, what can wait and what to drop. It is useful before committing budget to a redesign, a new system or advertising. Ours is a two-hour video session with written recommendations within 48 hours; it costs $500, credited toward a project started within 30 days.

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A discovery phase is a paid stage before development in which an idea becomes documents that a price and a deadline can rest on: requirements, user flows, a clickable prototype, architecture, integrations, risks and a backlog with an estimate. It matters when quotes for the same idea differ widely. Our discovery phase takes two to four weeks, starts from $4,000, and its documents are written so that any team can work from them.

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An MVP, or minimum viable product, is the first version of a product with just enough features for real users to try it and pay for it, so that demand is tested by the market rather than by opinions. A good MVP is cut in scope, not in quality: its data model and code should survive growth. Our MVP projects start from $20,000 and usually take two to four months.

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Technical due diligence is an independent review of a company's code, infrastructure, security, licenses and control of domains and accounts, carried out for a buyer or investor before a deal. It shows what is really being bought, what depends on specific people and what the fixes will cost. Our session costs $1,500 and a full review starts from $7,500; most engagements take five to ten business days.

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A fractional CTO is an experienced chief technology officer who works for a company part time: deciding on stack, architecture, vendors and hiring, and reviewing the work of developers, without the cost of a full-time executive. It fits companies that depend on technology but cannot yet justify a full-time CTO. Our base price, from $3,500 a month, covers about one day a week and runs month to month.

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A digital ownership audit is a review of what a business actually owns and what it rents or depends on across its website, code, data, tools, vendor contracts and key people. It answers one question: what breaks if a developer, an agency or a platform disappears tomorrow. Ours ends with a map of ownership and dependencies and a priority list; it starts from $1,000 and takes five to ten business days.

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Total cost of ownership, or TCO, is the full cost of a system over its working life, not only the price of building or buying it: subscriptions, apps and transaction fees, hosting, support, upgrades, testing, further development and the cost of working around platform limits. Comparing a one-off build quote with a monthly subscription without TCO is a common mistake. In our platform comparisons we look five years ahead.

More: Leaving Magento in 2026: Upgrade, Shopify Plus or Custom Laravel?

Build vs buy is the decision whether to develop custom software or use a ready-made product, usually software as a service (SaaS). Both sides have changed: platforms do far more than they used to, and custom development has become faster with modern frameworks and AI. The choice is often not permanent: a company can buy and configure first, learn how its process really works, then extend or build.

More: The Build vs. Buy Equation Has Changed. Most Companies Have Not Recalculated It.

Laravel is an open-source PHP framework for building web applications, client portals, back offices and online stores with custom business logic. A new major version comes out every year, with bug fixes for 18 months and security fixes for two years (Laravel, October 2026). We choose it when pricing, integrations or processes are specific to the business and a ready-made platform would need constant workarounds.

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A web application is software that runs in a browser and does work for its users rather than only showing information: a client portal, an order or booking system, an internal tool or a SaaS product with accounts, roles and data. Unlike a website, it is built around user roles, permissions and integrations. Our web application projects start from $25,000, and large products are split into stages with separate estimates.

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Technical debt is the accumulated cost of past shortcuts in software: outdated versions, quick fixes, copied templates, abandoned plugins and undocumented integrations that still work but make every change slower and more expensive. It is usually invisible while the system runs and surfaces during a redesign, a migration or an AI project. An audit before such work shows the debt before it shows up in the budget.

More: The Hidden Technical Debt That Makes Website Redesigns More Expensive Than Planned

A legacy system is software still in daily use whose platform, language version or framework is outdated or out of support, such as a store or a CRM on an old version of PHP or Laravel. It may work fine day to day, yet it blocks security updates, new integrations and AI tools, whose packages require current versions. The usual choice is between a staged upgrade and a rebuild.

More: An AI Project Stuck on a Legacy System? Upgrade First, Then Automate

A major version upgrade is the move of a site or application to a new major release of its framework or programming language, where breaking changes are expected. Laravel ships one every year, so a site left untouched for five years is about five versions behind. The safe way is one version at a time on a closed copy, with tests and a rollback plan. One of our projects went from Laravel 7 to 13 in three days.

More: Upgrading an Old Laravel or PHP Site in 2026

A project takeover is the transfer of a live site, store or product from a previous agency or freelancer to a new team: collecting access and code, finding out how the project is deployed, stabilizing it and continuing development. It is needed when the previous contractor has left, stopped answering or keeps missing deadlines. Ours starts with an audit from $2,500, and nothing changes in production until backups work.

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AGENTS.md is a plain Markdown file at the root of a code repository that tells AI coding agents how to work in the project: commands, rules, constraints and everything that is not obvious from the code. Most major coding agents read it, and since December 2025 the format has been stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. At handover our clients receive one with the code, deployment commands and a rollback procedure.

More: Your Codebase Needs a Manual for AI

A staging environment is a closed copy of a live site or application, with the same code, settings and a copy of the data, where changes are tested before real users see them. It should be closed at the server level, not only marked noindex, and personal data in the copy is best anonymized. In our Laravel 7 to 13 upgrade, staging caught two failures that would otherwise have reached the live site.

More: Six Laravel Versions in Three Days

A rollback plan is a written and tested way to return a system to its last working state if a release or an upgrade goes wrong: the previous code version, a database backup, the deployment steps and the person who decides to roll back. It turns a failed release into minutes of inconvenience instead of an outage. In our upgrades every step has one, and it stays ready until the client confirms that everything works.

More: Website Modernization: PHP, Laravel & CMS Upgrades

QA testing, short for quality assurance, is the systematic checking of software against its requirements before and after every release: manual test cases, automated tests, regression, performance and load testing. Its job is to find defects before users do, not to fix them; fixing is development work. Our QA specialists work from $30 an hour, either by the hour or full time for a fixed monthly amount.

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DevOps, from development and operations, is the practice of automating how software is built, tested, deployed and run, so that releases are frequent, repeatable and reversible: continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring, backups and access control. In a small company it often means that releases stop depending on one person's laptop. Our DevOps engineers work at $50 to $70 an hour.

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Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI model in plain language and accepting the code it writes, often without reading it. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025. It is a fast way to test an idea, but a vibe-coded product that takes payments or personal data needs a review of its security, data handling and code before real customers arrive.

More: You Built an MVP With AI. Keep It, Fix It or Rebuild It?

An AI agent is software built on a language model that can act, not only answer: it searches data, calls APIs, updates records, creates tickets or starts payments to reach a goal with limited human input. Because it executes decisions, its permissions, limits, action logs and monitoring have to be designed into the architecture. Agentic AI compliance is the practice of keeping those actions within legal and business boundaries.

More: Agentic AI Compliance: How to Secure, Govern and Monitor AI Agents

An AI website assistant is a conversational assistant on a site that answers visitors from verified facts about the business, such as services, prices, terms and availability, qualifies requests and hands the conversation to a person when needed. Unlike a scripted chatbot or a free-form generative bot, it is built not to invent prices or deadlines. Our assistants start from $5,000, or from $12,000 with integrations.

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Replatforming is moving an online store or a site from one platform to another, for example from Magento to Shopify Plus or to a custom Laravel build, while keeping products, customers, orders, URLs and search rankings. Most of the risk lies outside the new design: data migration, redirects, integrations, checkout and structured data. A written checklist and a redirect map prepared before launch decide whether the traffic survives.

More: Moving to Shopify Plus? 8 Things to Check Before You Migrate

Shopify Plus is Shopify's plan for larger and fast-growing merchants. It starts from $2,300 a month and adds a fully customizable checkout, unlimited B2B catalogs and staff accounts, up to nine expansion stores and higher API limits (Shopify, October 2026). For a standard direct-to-consumer store it is often the simplest choice; business rules unique to the company may need apps or workarounds.

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Headless commerce is an architecture in which the storefront, the part customers see, is built separately from the commerce engine that holds products, prices, orders and payments, and the two exchange data through application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows custom experiences, several storefronts and new channels such as apps or AI interfaces without rebuilding the back end. The cost is more code to build and maintain, so it should solve a real business need.

More: What Happens to E-Commerce When a Website Stops Being a Website?

B2B e-commerce is business-to-business online selling, such as a manufacturer selling to dealers or a wholesaler to shops. Compared with retail it adds company accounts with several buyers, customer-specific price lists and catalogs, volume discounts, payment on terms, quotes and repeat orders, often tied to an ERP. These rules are where a standard store platform most often needs custom work.

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Faceted navigation is the set of filters in an online store, such as brand, size, color and price, that narrow down a category. Every combination can create its own URL, so a catalog can generate thousands of near-identical pages that waste crawling and compete with the main categories. The fix is a rule in the code: index only the combinations with real search demand and keep the rest out of the index.

More: Filters and Faceted Navigation: How Online Stores Create Thousands of Duplicate Pages

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, is software that keeps every contact, deal, conversation and task with customers in one place, so that sales and service teams see the full history and the pipeline. Off-the-shelf CRMs cover most standard sales processes; a custom CRM makes sense when the process itself is what sets the business apart. Our custom CRM projects start from $30,000.

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An ERP, or enterprise resource planning system, is software that runs the internal side of a business in one database: inventory, purchasing, production, logistics, finance and staff. A CRM looks outward at customers, while an ERP looks inward at resources. Companies usually reach for one when spreadsheets and disconnected tools can no longer keep up. Our custom ERP projects start from $50,000.

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Agentic commerce is shopping in which an AI agent searches, compares and adds products to the cart, and sometimes pays, on a person's behalf. For a store it means that product data, prices, shipping and returns must be readable by machines, and that bot protection must not block legitimate assistants. In our October 2026 test, an agent reached the cart in 11 of 15 large US online stores.

More: We Sent an AI Agent Shopping in 15 US Online Stores. Here Is Where It Gave Up

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the work that helps a site's pages rank in search results for the queries its customers use: technical health, site structure, content, internal links and links from other sites. Results build over months, not weeks. In 2026 SEO is also the foundation for AI search, since AI answers draw on pages that search engines can crawl and trust. Our SEO work starts from $1,500 a month, and SEO for online stores from $2,500 a month.

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AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the work of making a business easy for answer engines such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity to understand, quote and recommend. In practice it means pages that answer real questions directly, clear facts about who the business is and what it does, structured data and consistent information across the web. AEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it.

More: What Is AEO? Answer Engine Optimization Explained for Small Business in 2026

GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of improving how generative AI systems describe and recommend a business in their answers. The term comes from a 2023 research paper; in practice GEO overlaps with AEO and covers a clear business entity, structured data, consistent language versions and content that AI can cite. Nobody can guarantee a mention in an AI answer. Our AEO and GEO audit costs $1,500.

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llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the root of a website that gives large language models (LLMs) a short, curated map of its key pages. It was proposed in 2024 and is not an official standard. Google's Search documentation (checked October 2026) says that Google Search does not use these files, so they neither help nor hurt rankings; other AI services may read them. Our maintenance plans keep it current along with structured data.

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Structured data is code on a page, usually JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) with the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines and AI systems exactly what the page describes: a product with its price and availability, an article and its author, an organization, an FAQ. Google recommends JSON-LD. Markup can make a page eligible for rich results, but it must match what visitors actually see.

More: Product Page SEO: Descriptions, Reviews and Structured Data That Earn the Click

Hreflang is an annotation in a page's code, sitemap or HTTP header that tells search engines which language and regional versions of a page exist, so that each searcher is shown the right one. Every version must list all the others and itself, and x-default marks the fallback page. Each language version should also be its own canonical; pointing them all to English hides the translations.

More: Multilingual SEO: Why Translated Pages Do Not Rank in Their Own Markets

A canonical URL is the address that a site declares, with a rel="canonical" tag, as the main version of a page available under several URLs, so that search engines consolidate signals there. Google treats it as a strong hint, not a command. It does not stop crawling and is not interchangeable with noindex or robots.txt; mixing them on the same pages is a common SEO mistake.

More: Filters and Faceted Navigation: How Online Stores Create Thousands of Duplicate Pages

Crawl budget is the number of URLs on a site that a search engine can and wants to crawl in a given time; Google defines it through crawl capacity and crawl demand. Google says it matters mainly for sites with about a million pages, or with ten thousand pages that change daily. In large online stores, filter combinations and duplicate URLs are what usually waste it.

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IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site notify search engines as soon as a page is added, changed or deleted, instead of waiting to be crawled. One submission is shared among the participating engines: Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon (IndexNow, October 2026). Google is not among them, so for Google sitemaps and its own crawling still do the work. We submit our own new pages through IndexNow every night.

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A redirect map is a table that pairs every old URL of a site with its new address before a migration or a redesign, so that each one gets a permanent 301 redirect to the closest matching page. Without it, links, bookmarks and search rankings lead to 404 errors. Google advises keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year, and mass redirects to the home page can be treated as soft 404s.

More: The Website Migration Checklist Most Agencies Skip

Link building is the work of earning links to a site from other relevant sites, such as industry media, partners, directories and research that others cite, because search engines treat such links as signals of authority. Quality and relevance matter far more than the number of links. Buying links that pass ranking value violates Google's spam policies and can lead to lower rankings or removal from results.

More: Link Building in 2026: Why It Still Matters and How to Do It Right

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities that Google's search quality rater guidelines use to judge whether content deserves trust, with trust as the most important. It is not a single ranking factor, but it describes what Google's systems aim to reward: content written by people who have done the thing, with clear authors and sources.

More: Human-First Content Strategy: Why AI Content Is Losing the Trust War in 2026

Transcreation is adapting content for another language and market instead of translating it word for word: the message, examples, tone, prices, units and calls to action are rewritten for local readers, while the facts stay the same. It matters for multilingual websites, ads and brand copy, where a literal translation reads as foreign and rarely ranks or sells in the target market.

More: Why Multi-Language Websites Need a Different Design Approach

A usability audit is an expert review of how easily people can do what they came for on a website or in an app: navigation, structure, forms, page speed, broken links and the points in the journey where visitors give up. It ends with a prioritized list of fixes rather than a new design, which often makes it a cheaper first step before a redesign. Our usability audit starts from $1,500.

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Information architecture is the structure of a website or an app: which pages and sections exist, how they are grouped and named, how navigation and internal links connect them, and where each type of content lives. It is designed before the visual design, usually as a sitemap and wireframes. Good information architecture helps visitors find what they need and helps search engines and AI systems understand the site.

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A design system is the shared set of rules and reusable parts behind a product's interface: colors, typography, spacing, components such as buttons and forms, and guidelines for using them, usually kept in Figma and matched in code. It keeps new screens consistent and speeds up both design and development. Without one, every new page looks slightly different from the last.

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Product design is the discipline of defining and designing a digital product as a whole: business goals, user needs, workflows, information architecture, data and technical limits, as well as the screens. User experience and user interface (UX/UI) design is one visible part of it. The result is a validated concept, a clickable prototype and a design system that a development team can build from without guessing.

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Brand identity is the visual and verbal system by which a business is recognized: name, logo, colors, typography, imagery, tone of voice and the rules for applying them to a website, packaging, documents and ads. It is built on positioning, not the other way round. Our brand identity work starts from $5,000, and a full identity system costs $10,000 to $20,000.

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Brand positioning is the deliberate choice of the place a brand should hold in customers' minds compared with the alternatives: whom it is for, what problem it solves and why it is the better choice for that customer. A useful positioning statement is specific enough to rule some customers out. It guides the website, the ads and the identity, and it comes before design.

More: Brand Positioning for Small Business: How to Write One That Customers Can Repeat

A landing page is a single web page built around one offer and one action, such as a request, a booking or a purchase, usually as the destination of an ad or email campaign. Everything on it supports that one decision, with as few distractions as possible. When ads bring clicks but not leads, the landing page is often where the problem lies. Our landing pages start from $4,000.

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The learning phase is the period after an ad set launches or is significantly edited, when Meta's delivery system explores whom to show the ads to and results are less stable. Meta's guidance is about 50 optimization events in the week after the last significant edit; an ad set unlikely to reach that is marked Learning limited. Frequent edits restart learning and waste budget.

More: Meta Ads Learning Phase: The Compound Interest Nobody Lets Finish Compounding

Advantage+ campaign budget, formerly campaign budget optimization (CBO), is a Meta Ads setting in which one budget is set for the whole campaign and Meta shifts it between ad sets in real time toward those it expects to perform best. It saves management time and reacts faster, but the advertiser gives up control over each ad set; minimum and maximum spend limits per ad set restore some of it.

More: Campaign Budget Optimization Is a Governance Decision, Not a Toggle

An ad set budget, often called ABO (ad set budget optimization), is a Meta Ads setup in which each ad set has its own fixed budget, so Meta cannot move money between them. It is used for tests, new audiences, markets or products that must get a guaranteed share of spend even if they look weaker at first. The cost is more manual work and a slower reaction to results.

More: Ad Set Budget Optimization: The "Losing" Ad Sets You Fund on Purpose

Daily vs lifetime budget is the choice of how Meta limits ad spend. A daily budget is an average per day: on a single day Meta may spend up to 75% more, but no more than seven times the daily budget in a calendar week. A lifetime budget is a hard cap for the whole run of a campaign or ad set with an end date, paced across its schedule.

More: Daily vs Lifetime Budget in Meta Ads Is a Fixed-Cost vs Variable-Cost Decision, Not a Setting

A minimum daily budget is the smallest daily amount Meta accepts for an ad set. Meta no longer publishes one fixed figure: it depends on country, objective, bid strategy, currency and schedule, and Ads Manager shows it. With a cost per result goal, the daily budget must be at least five times that goal. The minimum only keeps ads running; leaving the learning phase takes about the target cost per result times 50, divided by 7, per day.

More: Meta Ads in 2026: What Budget Do You Really Need to See Results?

An account spending limit is a cap on the total amount a Meta ad account can spend; when it is reached, all ads stop until the limit is raised, reset or removed. The amount spent does not reset by itself, for example at the end of a month. It is a safety switch for the business's cash, separate from campaign budgets and campaign spending limits.

More: Your Meta Spending Limit Is a Circuit Breaker, Not a Setting

A billing threshold, also called a payment threshold, is the amount of Meta ad spend at which your card or PayPal is charged automatically; anything left is charged on the monthly billing date. In a month you may reach the threshold several times or not at all. Meta can raise the threshold as spending grows, and some larger accounts may be required to switch to monthly invoicing or direct debit. It is a cash flow setting.

More: Meta Quietly Rewired How It Collects Money From Advertisers in 2026

ROAS, or return on ad spend, is the revenue from advertising divided by what was spent on it: $4,000 of sales from $1,000 of ads is a ROAS of 4. Whether that is profitable depends on margins: break-even ROAS is 1 divided by the gross margin, so a business with a 50% margin needs at least 2 to break even. Without honest attribution of revenue, ROAS means little.

More: Meta Ads in 2026: What Budget Do You Really Need to See Results?

Cost per lead, or CPL, is advertising spend divided by the number of leads it produced, such as form requests, calls or bookings. It is useful only next to lead quality and the conversion to sales: a cheap lead that never buys costs more than an expensive one that does. A rising CPL usually comes from audience fatigue, a weak offer, tracking gaps or the landing page.

More: Why Your Cost Per Lead Keeps Going Up in 2026 (10 Fixes)

SMM, or social media marketing, is the use of social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn and Threads to build an audience, earn trust and bring in customers: content, community management, paid promotion and analytics. It works when it follows a strategy and a business goal, not just a posting calendar. Our SMM work starts from $1,500 a month.

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A social media strategy is a plan that ties a business's social media to its goals: which audiences to reach, on which platforms, with what message and content, how often, with what budget, and which numbers show that it is working. It comes before content production and account management. Without it, posting becomes a calendar of activity that is hard to connect to sales.

More: What Is a Social Media Strategy and Why Does a Business Actually Need One?

IT outsourcing is handing a project or a whole function, such as development, testing or support, to an outside company that takes responsibility for the result, the team and the way the work is organized. The client sets goals and accepts the work but does not manage individual developers. It fits when the scope is clear and the company does not want to build its own technical department.

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Outstaffing is a model in which specialists employed by an outside company join the client's own team and work under the client's management, while the provider handles hiring, contracts, equipment, payroll and replacements. The client controls tasks and priorities; the provider is responsible for the people. Our outstaffed specialists cost $45 to $65 an hour, depending on seniority.

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A dedicated team is a stable group of specialists, such as developers, QA, a designer, a project manager and DevOps, assembled by a provider to work only on one client's product, month after month. Unlike outstaffing, the team comes with its own project manager and the provider runs how it works, while the client sets priorities. Our teams cost from $3,500 a month and are usually ready in two to four weeks.

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A fixed-price contract is an agreement in which the scope, the total price and the timeline are set in writing before work begins, and the provider is responsible for delivering that scope for that price. It suits work that can be specified in advance. Changes in scope are discussed and agreed before they are done, not billed afterwards. Most of our projects are priced this way.

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Time and materials is a pricing model in which the client pays for the hours actually worked at agreed rates, plus direct costs such as licenses or hosting. It suits work whose scope cannot be fixed in advance: an evolving product, ongoing development, support or specialists joining the client's team. Because it is flexible, it needs regular reports and a budget cap. Our hourly rates are published on our pricing page.

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A maintenance SLA, or service level agreement, is the part of a support contract that defines what the provider commits to: response and fix times by severity, what is monitored, how often backups run, what is included each month and how incidents are reported. It turns support from favors into obligations. In our maintenance plans, response times and monthly scope are agreed at the start; plans start from $1,000 a month.

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