Integration Support Retainer

Why do integrations need ongoing support?

An integration is finished the day it ships and unfinished every day after. Tokens expire. Vendors deprecate an endpoint, rename a field, change a webhook signature or move a feature to a higher plan. Xero now charges for API access on usage-based tiers, and other vendors change their terms without notice. Certificates lapse, a connector platform retires a version, and the person who set up the authorisation leaves. None of that is a defect in the build; it is the environment the build lives in. The retainer is the part of the service that deals with the environment.

What does the retainer cover?

Monitoring

Every covered integration has health checks that confirm records are moving and alerting that reaches a person, not a dashboard. Where we built the integration, the monitoring is already wired into its CI pipeline and the retainer keeps someone watching it. Where we did not, monitoring is added in the first month. When a run fails, it is identified, the cause is found, the run is replayed and the affected records are checked.

Token and credential rotation

API keys, OAuth client secrets, webhook signing keys and service accounts are rotated on a schedule and logged. Rotation is done without a code change and without downtime, and every credential is stored on the backend only. The log tells you, and any auditor, when each secret was last changed and by whom.

Vendor change response

When a vendor announces or ships a change, the contract tests are the first to know. The retainer covers reading the vendor's change notices, updating the contract tests, changing the integration to match and confirming the end-to-end tests still pass. Where the change carries a cost, such as a vendor moving API access to a paid tier, you are told before it lands and the fee is named, never absorbed and passed on silently.

How is the retainer priced?

The price is from $250 a month + GST. The figure depends on how many integrations are covered, how many vendors they touch and how much rotation and vendor activity those vendors generate. The agreement names the integrations covered and the hours included each month, in writing, before it starts. Work outside that is quoted separately.

The retainer is month to month with no minimum term and no lock-in. Third-party platform and API fees are named in the agreement, and who pays each is settled in writing before it begins. The retainer covers integrations and their monitoring; it does not cover the website they sit on. The website care plan covers hosting, updates and backups for the site itself, and the two are often held together.

What about integrations we did not build?

You do not need to have built with us. An integration built by another developer or agency can be brought under the retainer, and the usual path is the integration audit first, so both sides know what is being supported. The audit establishes the test suites and the findings; the retainer keeps them passing. A connector-level integration on Zapier, Make or n8n is supported the same way, with re-authorisation, error handling and connector version changes handled as part of the plan.

Where a covered integration was built as a standard integration build or a two-way sync, the retainer picks up the monitoring, contract tests and runbook that build already produced, which is why the tests and monitoring are never an optional line in the build price.

Who owns what?

You own every account, credential, repository, test suite and monitoring configuration, throughout the retainer and after it. We work with access you grant and can revoke. Credentials are held in your secret store, not ours. If you end the retainer, nothing needs to be handed back because nothing was ever ours, and the runbook already describes how to do everything we were doing.