White-Label Drupal Support and Maintenance

Ongoing Drupal maintenance delivered under your agency brand, on a monthly retainer. Your client never learns we exist, and you keep the relationship and the margin.

For agencies

You keep the client. We stay behind you.

Agencies rarely lose a Drupal client on the build. They lose them later, when the developer who built it has left, security advisories keep landing, and nobody on staff wants to own a codebase they did not write. This service stops that happening: a senior Drupal team behind your brand, on a monthly retainer, patching, fixing and answering tickets under your name. We take on sites we did not build, which is usually the whole point.

  • Your client contracts with you

    Your client pays you and talks to you; we work to you. We do not contact your client, we do not appear on their site, and we do not take work from them directly, before or after the engagement ends.

  • Tickets in your system

    We take tickets from your system rather than setting up our own, write in the voice and format your client already receives, and anything that goes back out carries your name.

  • On your call, when needed

    If your client wants a call with the developer, one of us joins it as part of your team, on your bridge, with your introduction. Plenty of agencies never need that.

  • NDA first

    Everything starts with an NDA, as it has since 2012. That is the same position as our white-label project delivery, and the two are often used together.

Fit

Who this is for

Agencies and web studios

  • With Drupal clients in support
  • Keeping the relationship, the invoice and the margin

In-house teams

  • Carrying more Drupal than they have specialists for

Consultancies

  • That won a Drupal project and now have to keep it alive

Retainer

What a monthly retainer covers

Scoped per site, because a brochure site and a Drupal Commerce platform with several integrations are not the same commitment.

  • Security advisories

    Applied for core and contributed modules on the schedule agreed, with the urgent ones out of band.

  • Bug fixes and hotpatches

    Against a defined ticket allowance.

  • Backups and restores

    Backups taken, and a restore actually tested rather than assumed.

  • Monitoring

    Uptime and error monitoring, with alerts reaching a person.

  • Performance

    Caching, aggregation, query and image handling.

  • Dependency currency

    So the site does not drift into a version you cannot upgrade.

  • A monthly report

    Written so you can forward it without editing.

  • Not in the retainer

    New features, a redesign or a version upgrade are quoted separately rather than absorbed quietly. A retainer that silently swallows project work runs out of hours and starts saying no.

The SLA, and what is actually in it

Our support operates around the clock, and our engineering day runs on Indochina Time, UTC+7, which overlaps the European morning and the whole Australian working day.

The numbers in an SLA are set per contract rather than published as a tier, because a response target you cannot meet is worse than an honest one. What the agreement fixes in writing before you sign:

  • Severity definitions. What counts as site-down, as degraded and as routine, agreed in advance so nobody argues about classification during an incident.
  • Response and update targets per severity. Time to first response, and how often you are updated while it is open. Response is separate from resolution: nobody can honestly quote a resolution time for a bug no one has seen yet.
  • Coverage hours per severity. Which severities are covered out of hours and at weekends.
  • The escalation path. Named people, in order, with the route to a manager rather than to a queue.
  • What is excluded. Third-party outages, client-side changes, and anything neither of us controls.

You are free to publish those terms to your client under your own brand. Many agencies do, because an SLA is easier to sell than an assurance.

Reporting your client can read

Every month you get a written report: advisories applied and what each one closed, tickets opened and resolved, uptime, anything found that is worth knowing before it becomes urgent, and the risks we think are accumulating.

It is written to be forwarded. No internal jargon, no ticket identifiers from a system your client cannot see, no mention of us. It is the part that turns "everything is fine" into evidence in the client conversation.

Taking over a site somebody else built

This is the normal case, not the exception, and we do not price a retainer until we know what is in the codebase.

Takeover runs as a short paid engagement before the retainer starts: a security and code audit, a dependency and module inventory, a look at the deployment path and the backup position, and a written list of what we would fix first. You get that document whether or not the retainer goes ahead, including the case where our recommendation is that the site needs an upgrade or a rebuild rather than a support contract.

Quoting a monthly fee on a codebase nobody has read is how support contracts end badly for both sides. We would rather find out first.

What it costs

Maintenance and support runs from $100 to $5K and above per month, per project, sized to the system. The published band is on our pricing page, and it is the same band our direct clients pay. There is no lock-in period.

What moves a site within that band: traffic and uptime expectations, how many contributed and custom modules are carried, how many integrations have to keep working, whether out-of-hours coverage is needed, and the ticket volume the site actually generates. The takeover audit turns those into a number, and the number is fixed for the term once agreed.

Agency terms are agreed before you commit, never after. That has been the position on every partner engagement since 2012.

How this differs from the warranty on our builds

A development project we build carries a warranty, held by the party that signs the project with us, which for agency work is your agency: one year by default, up to three. It covers defects in what we delivered against what was agreed. It is not a support contract, it does not cover a change of requirement, and it does not cover a site somebody else built. The warranty policy sets out the boundary.

A support retainer is the other thing: continuous care of a running system, including one we did not write, including changes nobody anticipated. Agencies routinely hold both: the warranty on the build, and a retainer for everything the warranty was never meant to cover.

Questions

Questions agencies ask

Will our client ever know you exist?

Not from us. We do not contact your client, appear in their reporting, or approach them for work during or after the engagement. If you want that written down beyond the NDA, it goes in the agreement before you sign.

Will you sign an NDA and non-solicitation terms?

Yes. An NDA is where every partner engagement starts and has since 2012. Non-solicitation of your clients and your staff, and ours, is written into the contract at signing rather than left to trust.

Do you support sites you did not build?

Yes, and that is most of this work. We run a paid takeover audit first (codebase, dependencies, permissions, deployment and backups), because a monthly fee quoted on an unread codebase is a guess that one of us pays for later.

What does it cost per month?

Our published band is $100 to $5K and above per month per project, sized to the system, with no lock-in. Where a given site lands depends on module count, integrations, traffic, out-of-hours coverage and real ticket volume. The takeover audit turns those into a fixed monthly figure for the term.

What are your response times?

They are set in the agreement per severity rather than published as a tier, and severity definitions are agreed in writing first so that nothing is argued about mid-incident. Support operates around the clock; our engineering day is UTC+7, which overlaps the European morning and the full Australian day.

What if the site needs more than maintenance?

We say so. If the real problem is an unsupported Drupal version, the answer is an upgrade, not a monthly patching fee that cannot fix it. Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026, and we would rather tell you that than bill you until it does.

Can we resell this at our own price?

Yes. You contract with your client on your own terms and at your own rate. Our agreement is with you, and your margin is your business.

Who owns the code we support?

Your client, or you, exactly as before. We take no licence over a codebase we maintain, and anything we write during the retainer belongs to whoever owns the rest of it.

Can we start with one site?

Yes, and that is the usual start: one site, one takeover audit, one retainer. More sites follow when the first one has proved itself.

What happens if we want to leave?

There is no lock-in period. You get the repository, the documentation and the runbooks, which you had access to throughout. A support relationship that depends on being hard to exit is not one worth keeping.

Start with one site

Tell us what you are carrying. The takeover audit gives both of us an honest picture before either of us commits to a monthly number.