You have a team. You still do not have a technology department.
Marketing owns the website until something breaks. Then it belongs to whoever is free. We work as the development group you never got around to hiring, on a cycle you can plan around.
Where growing businesses get stuck
You are past the stage where one person can hold everything. There is a marketing lead, maybe an operations manager, probably an agency or two in the history. What there is not is anyone whose job is the technology itself.
So work queues behind whoever has capacity. A campaign page waits on a freelancer. An integration nobody documented breaks and takes a week to diagnose. Every quarter the list of deferred things gets a little longer.
Hiring for this is expensive and slow, and one developer cannot cover design, analytics, accessibility, and the platform your store runs on. We cover that range as a single team, under one agreement.
The shape of a working engagement
Most of our mid-size clients settle into the same rhythm within a couple of months. Here is what that arrangement actually looks like.
One monthly amount, billed upfront
Retainers start at $2,500 a month and scale with how much development you need. Paying upfront is what reserves our time, and it means nobody is billing you for a phone call.
A cycle you can plan around
A shared backlog, a set of priorities you approve, and a summary at the end of every cycle showing what shipped, what is next, and what is blocked on your side.
Capacity held back on purpose
The urgent landing page and the same-day fix arrive whether or not they were on the roadmap. We hold capacity for them instead of pretending they will not show up.
Where we usually plug in
Most engagements start with one of these and quietly grow into three. Because it is one team, context carries across them and nothing gets rebuilt because someone missed what came before.
The site, maintained and improved
New pages, features, and fixes, plus the updates and patching that keep the whole thing standing. Built so your marketing team can edit without filing a ticket.
Design that keeps up
Campaign pages, refreshes, and email templates that stay recognizably yours.
Numbers you can act on
Tracking set up from first principles, so you can tell which change moved which number.
Systems that talk to each other
Your site, your CRM, your fulfillment or booking tools, connected narrowly enough to stay maintainable.
Built in, not billed extra
WCAG standards are part of how we build. That widens your customer base and lowers your legal exposure at the same time.
How decisions get made when nobody owns technology
The hardest part of these engagements is rarely the code. It is knowing who decides, and how fast. We set that up in the first two weeks.
One person decides
We ask you to name a single person who can approve priorities and unblock us. Everyone else can be in the thread. Committees are where timelines go to die.
Recommendations come with reasoning
You get what we would do and why, grounded in your analytics and what we found in the code. You are approving a decision, not refereeing a debate.
We will tell you not to do things
Including things you asked for. If a feature will cost more to maintain than it earns, we will say so before we build it.
Decisions get written down
What we chose and why lives with the work, so nobody has to reconstruct it when your marketing lead changes next year.
You talk to the people building it
There is no account manager relaying messages. The people on the call are the people doing the work.
Two businesses, two very different rhythms
One sells snacks and ships campaigns every few weeks. One runs a clinic where the news sets the schedule. Same engagement model underneath.
Rebuilding a Shopify store, then maintaining it
Running the development team for a Phoenix healthcare clinic
Questions people ask before they start
- We already have a marketing team. Where do you fit?
-
Underneath them. Your marketing team decides what the campaign is and what the site should say. We build it, keep it standing, and tell them what is technically possible before they promise it to someone.
In practice that means they stop waiting on a freelancer for every page and stop owning problems they were never hired to solve.
- What does a two-week sprint with you include?
-
A sprint starts with a shared backlog and an agreed set of priorities. Most of it is roadmap work: new pages, features, and fixes you asked for. We also hold back capacity for the things that show up mid-sprint, like an urgent press release or a same-day fix. At the end of every sprint you see what shipped, what is next, and what is blocked.
- Do you work with our existing design or branding agency?
-
Often, yes. On several engagements the design direction comes from a partner agency and we handle the development that brings it to life. The pattern that works: they deliver comps, we build to them, they sign off. We are happy to sit in the same threads and keep the handoff clean.
- Do you charge extra for refreshes, integrations, or new pages?
-
Sometimes. Small additions usually fit inside your existing hours. Larger initiatives, like a full refresh or a multi-week integration, often expand scope. We talk about that explicitly when it comes up. There are no hidden charges.
- How fast do you respond to emergencies?
-
Response SLAs are tier-dependent and written into your contract. The Steady tier is within two business days for non-urgent work and within twenty-four hours for site-down emergencies. Active and In motion tiers tighten that further.
- Can we talk to one of your current clients before we sign?
-
Ask and we will make the introduction where the client has agreed to it. We would rather you hear about the working relationship from someone living it than read about it on our website.
Wondering what a standing development team would change?
Bring your site, your stack, and the list of things that keep sliding to next quarter. We will tell you what we would pick up first, what we would leave alone, and what the arrangement would cost.
If we are not the right fit, we will usually point you somewhere that is.