External DevOps team on retainer. No hiring, no recruitment, no turnover.
Why companies abandon in-house DevOps
Cost of hiring
A Senior DevOps Engineer costs 4,700–7,000 EUR/month in employer cost + benefits + recruitment costs (3–6 months of searching). One role, one person, one set of know-how.
Industry turnover
The average tenure of a DevOps engineer at one company is 2 years. Then recruitment starts again, onboarding from scratch, loss of infrastructure knowledge.
Single point of failure
Vacations, sick leave, resignations — when your only DevOps is unavailable, the infrastructure is left unattended. No one knows how monitoring works. No one responds to alerts.
In-house DevOps vs freelancer vs agency vs OPSWRO retainer
| IN-HOUSE | FREELANCER | AGENCY | OPSWRO RETAINER | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | 4,700–7,000 EUR/mo + benefits | 35–60 EUR/h | 70–120 EUR/h | from 120 EUR/mo |
| Availability | 8h/day, vacations, sick leave | Depends on workload | Depends on contract | SLA up to 24/7/365 |
| SLA | No formal SLA | None | Negotiated | Contractual, with penalties |
| Knowledge retention | Leaves with employee | No documentation | Variable quality | Documentation + team |
| Scalability | Another role = another recruitment | One person | Flexible, expensive | Change package in 24h |
Three packages tailored to the scale and criticality of your environment
- Hours included 2h/mo
- Response time (SLA) 8 business hours
- Monitoring Status alerts
- Patch management On request
- Incident response Best-effort
- Communication channel Email
- Quarterly review —
- Dedicated Account Manager —
- Hours included 10h/mo
- Response time (SLA) 4 business hours
- Monitoring 24/7 with alerting
- Patch management Monthly
- Incident response Priority
- Communication channel Email + Slack
- Quarterly review ✓
- Dedicated Account Manager —
- Hours included 25h/mo + on-call
- Response time (SLA) <15 min · 24/7/365
- Monitoring 24/7 + dedicated dashboard + weekly reports
- Patch management Weekly
- Incident response Dedicated on-call engineer
- Communication channel Slack Connect + on-call phone
- Quarterly review ✓
- Dedicated Account Manager ✓
Unused hours roll over to the next month (max 3-month carry-over). Overtime is billed at the retainer rate −15% relative to the consulting rate. Monthly or annual contracts (−10%) and two-year contracts (−15%).
What we do under the retainer
Specific tasks covered by every package — within the pool of hours.
Patching OS and Kubernetes
Regular updates of operating systems, Kubernetes components, certificates and cluster add-ons.
Monitoring and alerting
Configuration and maintenance of Prometheus, Grafana, alerts. Responding to anomalies before they become incidents.
Minor configuration changes
Changes requiring <2h of work: new ingress, limit change, environment variable update, etc.
Incident response
Response to incidents according to package SLA. Diagnosis, fix, post-mortem and preventive actions.
Quarterly review
Infrastructure review, report with recommendations, cost review and optimization (Business and Enterprise).
Documentation
Maintenance of runbooks, architecture diagrams and operational procedures. Updates after every change.
On-call (Enterprise)
Dedicated on-call engineer 24/7 with an alert phone. Response <15 minutes to critical incidents.
What is NOT included in the retainer
The retainer covers maintenance, not construction. Larger projects are separate fixed-price engagements.
Recognize something from this list? See our implementation projects — we quote within 48h after a technical call.
How we start the collaboration
Four weeks from contract signing to full takeover of infrastructure care.
Inventory and access
We map the infrastructure, collect access, identify risks. We document the current state.
Monitoring and runbooks setup
We deploy monitoring, configure alerts, write operational procedures for typical scenarios.
Handover from the current team
Knowledge transfer sessions with your team. We take over the knowledge, complete documentation, test procedures.
First quarterly cycle
We start full care. First status report, proposed optimizations, plan for the next quarter.
Frequently asked questions about the retainer
One month. We offer monthly contracts or annual (−10%) and two-year (−15%). No hidden fees, no activation charges.
1 month notice. We hand over full documentation, access and runbooks. No lock-in — the infrastructure is yours.
A dedicated engineer (or team in Enterprise) with full documentation. We don't change people every quarter. If turnover occurs — handover with a minimum 2-week overlap.
We work on your tools. We don't impose ours. If we recommend a change — we justify it. The decision is always yours.
Email → Slack → phone. In Enterprise a dedicated 24/7 emergency number. Every incident has an assigned priority and escalation path defined in the contract.
Ready for an external DevOps team?
Book a 30-minute technical call. No commitment. We respond within 4 hours.
BOOK A RETAINER CALL →INTERESTED IN THE RETAINER?
LET'S TALK.
Book a 30-minute technical call. No commitment.
We respond within 4 hours.