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POLARGATE
Care // Your software stays alive, looked after by the people who built it.

Maintenance and ServiceDesk

A monthly retainer for software already in production: two separate budgets of senior hours, planned maintenance and urgent work, run through a ServiceDesk your team uses by email, with a full audit and a written report every month.

The support desk: two people on headsets with the ticket queue and a conversation open on screen.

What it is

Polargate CARE is a monthly retainer for software that is already live: a website, an internal portal, a product or a mobile app. It buys two separate budgets of senior hours. The first covers planned maintenance: dependency and framework updates, security headers and policies, accessibility and performance regressions, content changes, analytics and search hygiene. The second covers urgent work: a form that stopped sending, a broken deploy, a page returning a 404, a third party that changed its API overnight. We keep the two apart on purpose, because when they share one pool the urgent work eats everything and the planned work never happens.

How we do it

Every client gets their own tenant in our ServiceDesk. You report a problem by writing to one email address, or from the portal, and both arrive in the same place: mail flows into and out of the ticket, so nobody on your side has to learn a new tool. Each ticket carries a priority, an owner and a full history, attachments stay private to that ticket, and every hour logged is charged to one of the two budgets, so the balance is visible while the month is running and not only when the invoice arrives. Routine fixes are prepared by our AutoFix agent, and a senior engineer reviews every change before it reaches production. Once a month we audit the whole thing: security, accessibility, performance, structured data, search and AI visibility, dead code. On Hotel Talavera one of those audits produced 48 confirmed findings and 16 real bugs fixed in a single month.

What you get

A named senior contact who already knows your codebase, because in most cases we built it. A ticket desk your team can use without training. A monthly report that says what was done, what it cost in hours, what the audit found and what we propose for the month ahead. Your repositories, your hosting accounts and your data stay in your name, so you can end the relationship with the code and the infrastructure intact.

What it costs

From 850 EUR per month, with a minimum of three months, because the first month goes mostly into learning the system and the value shows up after that. The size of the two budgets is agreed before we start and reviewed every quarter. Work that falls outside them is quoted before it starts, never after. We do not sell 24/7 cover, and we do not resell hosting: you pay Vercel, Supabase or your own provider directly, at their price.

Proof

FAQ

Questions, answered

How much does website and software maintenance cost per month?
Polargate CARE starts from 850 EUR per month, with a minimum of three months. That covers two separate budgets of senior hours, planned maintenance and urgent work, plus your ServiceDesk tenant, the monthly audit and the written report. How big the budgets are depends on the size of the system and how critical it is, and we agree that with you before you sign anything.
What is included in the retainer and what is billed separately?
Included: updates, security and accessibility fixes, small content and design changes, health checks, the monthly audit and the report. Not included: new features, redesigns or a second product. When a request is bigger than the retainer, we quote it as a project before starting, never afterwards. Hosting and third party licences you pay directly to the provider, at their price, in your own accounts.
How fast do you respond when something breaks on our site?
Urgent tickets jump the queue and are paid from the urgent budget, which exists so that nobody has to negotiate a fix while the site is down. Response targets are written into the contract and depend on how critical the system is, so we set them with you rather than publish one number for everyone. Polargate does not sell 24/7 cover, and we say that before you sign, not after.
How long is the minimum contract and how quickly can we start?
Three months minimum, then it continues month to month. The first two weeks are setup: access to repositories and hosting, health checks, your ServiceDesk tenant and a first audit. After that the cycle is monthly. If we did not build the system, we normally start with a paid Discovery Sprint or an audit, so we know what we are taking responsibility for before we take it on.
Can you maintain a website or app that another agency built?
Yes, and an inherited system almost always starts with an audit rather than a retainer. We read the code, the dependencies, the security setup and the hosting, then tell you what we found and what it would cost to make it maintainable. If a system is beyond safe repair, we say so instead of billing you monthly for it. We do not take on software we cannot keep running responsibly.
What happens to the hours we do not use in a month?
Both budgets are tracked in the client portal, so you watch the balance during the month instead of guessing at the end of it. We do not invent work to spend the remainder. If you consistently use less than you pay for, we lower the plan at the quarterly review. If you consistently need more, we tell you before the overrun and quote it, not after the fact.
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