We don't disappear after go-live

Ongoing responsibility for a live application: monitoring, patching, backups, incident response, performance work and small engineering changes. It differs from traditional managed IT, which usually means laptops, networks and helpdesk. This is about the application and the infrastructure it runs on.

It is driven by how much is running, how critical it is, and how much ongoing engineering is included. The cost that catches people out is not the retainer but the state of the system when it is handed over — an application with no monitoring, no tested backup and two years of unpatched dependencies takes real work before it can be run cheaply.

No. Taking on someone else's application is common. It starts with an assessment, because we will not put our name on a system without first knowing what is in it.

That depends on the agreement, and it should be decided honestly rather than optimistically. Genuine round-the-clock response costs more than most businesses need. For many, alerting plus a defined morning response is the right trade — but that should be a decision, not an accident.

Yes, and it is often the better arrangement: the internal team keeps product knowledge and roadmap, and we carry the operational load — patching, monitoring, releases and out-of-hours.

You take the documentation, the infrastructure-as-code, the runbooks and the access, because they were yours throughout. A supplier that makes leaving hard is telling you something about their confidence in the service.