Partner Retainer

An ongoing engineering partnership for companies running AI workflows in production — whether those are custom-built agents, vendor-integrated tooling, or hybrid stacks. Fixes, iterations, advisory, and new builds land in one channel and ship on the tier’s cadence. Six-month minimum, twelve preferred. After a Build engagement, this is how you keep the workflow healthy and keep shipping more.

What you get

• Operational coverage of every AI workflow under retainer — monitoring response, bug fixes, threshold tuning, vendor configuration adjustments, integration maintenance.
• New AI-workflow builds at the tier’s quarterly cadence — custom, vendor-integrated, or hybrid as the workflow demands.
• Architecture & roadmap advisory — written reviews of new ideas before build-or-buy commitment.
• Monthly written report (PDF + Markdown) — shipped, deferred, hours used, next-month plan, risks.
• Quarterly business review — scope for the upcoming quarter; tier-fit assessment; renewal conversation when approaching term end.
• Dedicated Slack channel at the tier’s SLA — the primary working surface between you and reflecttech.
• Incident response logs — every production incident gets a written post-mortem within 5 business days.

How it works

The first 30 days are structured onboarding — access, inventory, backlog, first quarterly build scope, first monthly report. After that the engagement settles into steady state: daily async triage in Slack, strategy syncs at the tier’s cadence, monthly written reports, quarterly business reviews. New builds are scoped in the last sync of the prior quarter.

Who it’s for

• You have at least one AI workflow in production — typically from a prior Build engagement, but bring-your-own works if the workflow is documented enough for me to operate it. Custom code, vendor-configured tooling, or hybrid all qualify.
• You want a single accountable engineering partner, not a rotating ticket queue at an agency.
• Your monthly budget is $6.5k–$12k and you can commit to a 6–12 month term.
• You want new AI workflows shipping on a quarterly cadence as part of the retainer (not just maintenance of existing ones).

Not the right fit if

• You don’t have any AI workflow in production yet — start with a Build first.
• You want hourly-rate consulting without commitment — the retainer is a partnership, not on-demand contracting.
• Your usage pattern is sporadic (one ticket every other month) — a retainer over-provisions for that shape.

What it costs

Tier-specific monthly fee, locked at signature. Six-month minimum; auto-renews month-to-month after the initial term unless either party gives 30 days’ notice.

Payment: first month due at signature; subsequent months invoiced on the 1st, Net-15. All payments via Stripe.

What’s not included: LLM API costs and vendor subscriptions (your accounts; I maintain cost monitoring regardless of provider), infrastructure / cloud costs (your bill), major new builds beyond the tier’s quarterly cadence (quoted as standalone Builds), security / compliance audits and SOC2 prep (scoped separately).

Reflecttech-managed hosting available at $400/month additional for net-new custom-built workflows delivered under retainer. Vendor-integrated workflows live in the vendor’s infrastructure under your account. Workflows brought in from prior Build engagements stay on your infrastructure.

What happens next