CONTINUOUS DELIVERY RETAINER
A senior, AI-native engineer works your backlog 150 hours a month, from $3,375.
US contract · Your repo, your IP · NDAs are standard
150 hours
A month, from $3,375 depending on the role
11
Roles you can staff it with
Every merge
Reviewed by a senior engineer
10 days
First contact to code in your repo
WHO IT'S FOR
01
The build is live and users are asking for things. You need someone shipping next month, and the month after.
02
A freelancer or first hire built most of it and left. Requests are piling up and nobody owns the release.
03
Your team is on the core roadmap. Integrations, the mobile app or test coverage wait another quarter, every quarter.
04
What started as small fixes is now feature work. You need a cadence and a person who knows the product.
PRICING
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY RETAINER
From $3,375/month
150 hours a month · one senior engineer
Retainers from $3,375 a month for 150 hours. The price depends on the role and is confirmed on a 30-minute call.
Every retainer includes
One retainer is one engineer in one role. Need two roles at once? Take two retainers, or move to an embedded team.
Third-party costs (cloud, APIs) are billed to your accounts at cost. Need a lead and a team inside your process? See Embedded Engineering Team, lead + 1 engineer from $8,000/month.
ROLES
Eleven roles, one contract. Every engineer is senior, works with AI in the loop, and has a senior engineer reviewing every merge. Retainers from $3,375 a month for 150 hours. The price depends on the role and is confirmed on a 30-minute call.
AI-NATIVE
Every engineer on a retainer works with AI in the loop. It handles the mechanical work: scaffolding, test generation, refactors and migration scripts. Your engineer spends their time on the decisions, and a senior engineer reviews every line before merge.
That review is the part that makes speed safe. Across 470 open-source pull requests, CodeRabbit found AI-co-authored code carried about 1.7× more major issues and 2.7× more security defects. We use the speed and keep the gate.
AI DRAFTS
scaffolding, tests, refactors
ENGINEER DECIDES
design, edge cases, what ships
SENIOR REVIEWS
every line before merge
RELEASE
with a changelog
Project engagements, built with the same workflow your retainer runs on.
COMPARE
| Care Plan | Prepaid Hours | Continuous Delivery Retainer | Embedded Team | Hiring one developer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | A stable product that needs someone accountable | Scoped changes, no monthly plan | A live product with a steady roadmap | A roadmap big enough for a team | A long-term core role |
| Work | Monitoring, patches, fixes, small changes | Whatever you scope into the hours | Features and fixes on a set cadence | Your whole roadmap, inside your process | Whatever you can manage |
| Who runs delivery | We do | We do, task by task | We do, against your priorities | Your PM, with our lead | You do |
| Cost | Flexible $2,000/mo · Dedicated $4,000/mo | $45/hour, 20 to 120 hours | 150 hours a month, from $3,375/mo by role | Lead + 1 engineer from $8,000/mo | Salary, benefits and recruiting |
| Time to start | Monitoring live within 5 business days of signing | Kickoff call after payment, then work starts | Code in your repo within 10 days of first contact | Contributing in 15 days | Months of search; 46% of new hires fail within 18 months (Leadership IQ) |
| Change or stop | 3-month minimum, then 30 days' notice | Hours valid 12 months; unused hours refundable within 15 days | 2-month minimum, then 30 days' notice | Change size between sprints | Notice, severance |
| Learn more | Care Plan → | Prepaid Hours → | You are here | Embedded Team → | Compare → |
Not sure which? We'll tell you on the call →
Weighing a hire? Read embedded team vs hiring in-house.
HOW IT RUNS
01
DAY 1
We go through the backlog with you and agree what ships this release. You can reorder anything that hasn't started.
02
DAYS 2–8
Work happens in your repo, on branches you can see. AI drafts, your engineer decides, and questions reach you in Slack the same day.
03
DAYS 8–9
A senior engineer reviews every line before merge. Changes are tested on staging before release.
04
DAY 10
We release, then send a short written changelog: what shipped, what moved, what's next.
On a weekly cadence, the same steps run inside one week. Once a month, we review lead time, failure rate and uptime with you.
PROOF
12 months
Booking SaaS
An embedded team of 4, 12 months in and now in Phase II. Five years of growth had outgrown a single server; it moved to GCP with zero-downtime deploys, and went from weekly crashes to zero crashes in 6 months.
Read the ZapBook case study →Years
Healthcare marketing
Has run on this arrangement for years.
“Arslan understood the requirements from day one and gave great advice on integrating AI into the platform.”
FAQ
Retainers from $3,375 a month for 150 hours. The price depends on the role and is confirmed on a 30-minute call. That's one senior engineer, and senior review on every merge is included.
