Services
Ongoing Support You Can Actually Rely On
Your digital product needs ongoing attention to stay healthy and keep improving. We provide that attention on a predictable monthly basis.
A website or application is not finished when it launches. It needs security updates. It gets new feature requests. Something breaks at an inconvenient time. The content needs refreshing. Performance degrades as traffic grows. Plugin or platform updates need to be evaluated and applied. Businesses that treat their digital products as done are the ones that end up dealing with avoidable incidents or falling behind their market. JTS offers support retainers that give you reliable ongoing care — a team that knows your systems, responds quickly, and keeps everything running and improving.
What a Retainer Covers
A JTS retainer is not a vague "support agreement" with fine print about what counts. We define clearly upfront what is in scope: which systems we are responsible for, what kinds of requests are covered, what our response time commitments are, and how we handle work that exceeds the monthly allocation.
Most retainers cover a combination of maintenance (keeping software, plugins, and dependencies updated), incident response (fixing things that break), and ongoing development (new features, content updates, design changes). The balance depends on your business — an e-commerce store will lean more heavily on maintenance and incident response; a product team will lean more on ongoing development.
Every retainer client gets a dedicated point of contact at JTS who understands their systems and business context. You are not submitting tickets into a pool of unknown support staff.
- Security and platform update management
- Incident response with defined SLA
- Content and design change requests
- Performance monitoring and optimisation
- New feature development from your backlog
- Regular check-in and roadmap review
Maintenance and Security Patching
Outdated software is the most common root cause of security incidents on small and medium business websites. WordPress core, plugins, and themes need regular updates — and those updates need to be tested before being applied to production. We handle this systematically: updates are applied to a staging environment first, tested against key functionality, and promoted to production only when they pass.
For cloud-hosted applications, we monitor infrastructure for deprecations, apply OS and runtime security patches, and review platform provider announcements for changes that could affect your deployment.
We also conduct periodic audits — dependency vulnerability scans, plugin permission reviews for Shopify stores, certificate expiry monitoring — to catch issues before they become incidents.
Response Time and Incident Handling
When something goes wrong, you want a team that can respond quickly and knows exactly how your systems are configured. Our retainer clients get priority response — a defined SLA based on severity, not a best-effort promise. Critical issues (site down, data access issues, payment processing failures) get same-day response. Non-critical issues are addressed within the agreed timeframe.
We maintain runbooks for each client environment — documented procedures for common incidents — so that the first responder can act immediately rather than spending time diagnosing the setup.
Post-incident, we write a brief root cause analysis and implement measures to prevent recurrence. Incidents are learning opportunities and we treat them as such.
Ongoing Development and Product Evolution
The best retainer relationships are not just break-fix. They are an ongoing partnership where we help your digital product evolve continuously — shipping small improvements regularly rather than infrequent large projects. This compound improvement model produces better outcomes over time and keeps your product competitive.
Retainer clients maintain a prioritised backlog with us. Each month we review priorities, estimate the work in scope for that month, and execute. You know what is coming, and you can adjust priorities as your business needs change.
What you get
Included in every engagement
- Defined scope of work and SLA document
- Dedicated point of contact who knows your systems
- Monthly maintenance and security update cycle
- Incident response with severity-based SLAs
- Prioritised development backlog and monthly delivery
- Regular check-in calls and progress reporting
- Annual infrastructure and security review
FAQ
Common questions
- What retainer sizes do you offer?
- Retainers are structured around monthly hour allocations — typically ranging from a maintenance-only package for stable sites up to a substantial monthly allocation for teams that want ongoing development. We will scope the right size based on your system complexity and how actively you expect the product to evolve. Unused hours do not roll over, which is why we right-size carefully at the start.
- What if we need more than the monthly allocation in a given month?
- Retainer clients have priority access to additional hours at a set rate, separate from project work. We will flag when a request looks likely to exceed the monthly allocation before starting the work, so you can decide whether to use additional hours, defer the work, or reduce the scope.
- We work with another agency for some things. Can we have a partial retainer?
- Absolutely. Some retainer clients use us for specific systems — cloud infrastructure and security, for example — while their primary agency handles design and content. We coordinate well with other vendors and define clean boundaries around responsibilities so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Can we start a retainer on a site we did not build with JTS?
- Yes. We start with an onboarding audit to understand the codebase, hosting environment, and existing processes. This takes us two to three weeks depending on complexity and is included in the first month of the retainer. After that, we are fully up to speed and operating as if we had built it ourselves.
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