You decide what counts as critical.

Severity

What each word in the table means.

• Critical. The system is down, unusable for everyone, or the money has stopped moving.
• Major. An important function is broken. Work continues, badly.
• Minor. A defect that irritates, or a question waiting for an answer.

You set the severity when you write. If we disagree, we will say so in the first reply and explain why, but the clock is already running on your judgement.

The tiers

What each one adds to the one before.

• Watch. Monitored, and kept current on security. Fixes are billed by the hour and you choose which happen.
• Care. Adds a monthly budget of hours for changes and priority over new commissions. Unused hours do not accumulate, and the budget is reviewed each quarter.
• Standby. Adds a named engineer who knows your system, and two restore drills a year: we break something deliberately and bring it back against a clock, so you know how long it really takes.

Changing

A tier is not a trap.

A tier goes up from the following month with no negotiation, and comes down or ends on one month’s notice, also with no negotiation. Nothing here renews silently, and you are never tied in for a year you did not ask for.

If the system was not built here, we start with a short fixed-price review and only then say which tier it is honest to take on. Promising a response time on code we have never seen is a promise made blind.

The questions

What people ask about support.

• What is the time to a fix? There is none in the table, deliberately. How long a repair takes depends on what broke. What we promise is the time to a human reply from somebody who has already looked.
• What if the problem is at another supplier? We answer within the same time and take the conversation with them off your desk. The time they spend is theirs, not ours, and the contract says so.
• What happens outside the window? You write, and you get an answer at the start of the next one. Only Standby carries a window every day, 8 to 22, and only critical work runs inside it.
• What about backups and coming back after an outage? Neither carries a number in the table, because both depend on where the system lives and who owns the machines underneath it. They are settled for each system on its own and written into the contract before the first month runs.
• Where does a problem get reported? To the support address your plan names. The general enquiries address carries no response time, so a report sent there waits its turn.
• Can you support a system you did not build? Yes, after the review. Sometimes the answer is that something has to be repaired before a response time means anything.
• And if the fault is in code we wrote ourselves? That one is ours to mend at our own cost while the build contract’s period is still running, whatever tier you hold.
• What does it cost? You pay monthly, and what you pay moves with the size of the system and the tier you take. We name it in writing once we have looked at the code.