Post Build
Maintenance
Maintenance is about making sure things works. Maintenance involves checking logs, server and database & infrastructure health, updating server & security, backups and backup restores, monitoring access and usage, fixing third party dependencies, fixing issues with browser updates, fixing exotic use cases, scaling to traffic, performance optimization, internal bugs and issues.
Maintenance can range from 10 – 25 hours a month for very little usage to a full-time engagement of multiple developers once you have significant operations.
Collaboration
Collaboration is about providing technical direction for software development team. This includes developing product planning and feature roadmaps, overall day-to-day management, gathering business requirements, architectural discussions and decisions, internal and external meetings, resource planning and workload scheduling.
Collaboration can range from 10 – 25 hours a month for very little usage to a full-time engagement once you have significant operations.
Continuous improvement
Continuous improvement is about iterating and improving the app, reacting to users’ feedback and adding new functionality. The amount of time is based on what is best for your unique business need and this can vary from 100 hours a month to a large amount of hours per month.
Post build monthly package
Because your goal is to actively grow your marketplace, we recommend a commitment to a combined maintenance, collaboration and continuous improvements monthly package. By having a set amount of hours allocated specifically to your marketplace in advance, we are able to effectively maintain the required resources.
In return, you get predictable monthly spending, fast lead time to issues and change requests, and proactive application and infrastructure health monitoring.
Our regular blended hour rate is $135 per hour. We offer blocks of hours in increments of 100s at a discounted rate of $100 per hour. The minimum monthly commitment is 200 hours ($20K/month). You have the option of adding more time in 100 hour blocks up to 1,000 hours per month at which point we would negotiate a different support structure specific to your needs.
Ad Hoc Pricing
Sometimes things don’t go the way you plan. We certainly hope that is not the case but if it is, we can offer hourly ad hoc rates to give you more flexibility. We don’t recommend this model because if we are not able to allocate specific resources to your marketplace on a regular basis, then we are unable to guarantee quick response times as depending on when your need arises, those resources may be otherwise allocated.
Much like staying at your favorite hotel, if you don’t book in advance, they may or may not have a room available—they could be fully booked for weeks.
We don’t want you to wait for weeks for a critical issue and while we would do what we could to get you in, there is no guarantee. This payment model is really only suitable for marketplaces that are not actively growing and are just in a maintenance mode where the likelihood of changes or issues is low and long respond time is acceptable.
Post-build recommended engagement
Although every business has their own unique requirements and usage, we find the following breakdown to work best. CTO, CCO, designers, frontend developers, system administrators, mobile apps developers, QA and copywriters can be involved in the project as needed part time. However, because the typical marketplace backend codebase is so large and complex and because its takes significant time to dive into a codebase for a new person, there must always be at least one (two and more at the later stages as usage increases) dedicated backend developer maintaining the codebase and doing fixes & coding new functionalities. Therefore, we recommend initial engagement start at 200 hours ($20K a month). This includes one dedicated backend developer focusing full-time on your project plus the rest of the team as described above as needed.
| Monthly Transaction Volume, $ | Recommended Package, Hours |
|---|---|
| $0 – $1M | 200 |
| $1M – $10M | 500 |
| $10 – 100M | 1,000 |
| $100M+ | 1,000+ |