Ruby on Rails Maintenance Retainer

Most Rails applications don’t fail in one big moment. They drift: a Rails version goes out of support, a gem gets abandoned, the CI pipeline gets slower every month, and a security advisory sits in the inbox because nobody has the time to look at it. Each item is small. Together they turn into the kind of upgrade project nobody wants to start.

With our maintenance retainer, we take ownership of that drift. We stay attached to your application month after month and keep it current, secure and easy to work on - without pulling your product team away from the roadmap.

Who it is for

• Companies that run a Ruby on Rails application in production and depend on it
• Teams that are busy shipping features and keep postponing maintenance work
• Products that were built by an agency or a former team and now have no one who looks after the foundation
• Companies that have just finished an upgrade and don’t want to fall behind again

What you get

• A maintenance roadmap. We review your application, its dependencies and its infrastructure, and turn the findings into a prioritized list of tickets with an effort estimate for each. We keep that list up to date, so there is always a clear answer to “what should we fix next?”
• Continuous upgrades. We keep Ruby, Rails and your gems on a steady upgrade path, one step at a time, instead of letting them pile up into a big, risky jump.
• Security watch. We follow security advisories for your stack, tell you what actually affects you, and prepare the fix - see security maintenance.
• Pull request reviews. We review pull requests from your team that touch the foundation - dependencies, configuration, database migrations, background jobs and deployment.
• CI/CD care. We keep your Continuous Integration fast and reliable and your Continuous Delivery pipeline working, including flaky test hunting.
• Performance and database health. We keep an eye on slow requests, slow queries and database load, and add the fixes to the roadmap before your users notice - see performance analysis and database optimization.
• A monthly status report. A short written summary of what we changed, what we found, and what we recommend for the coming month.
• Regular check-in calls. A recurring call with your team to go through the roadmap, answer questions and agree on priorities.
• Direct line for questions. Ask us in your team chat or by email whenever something in the Rails foundation is unclear - no ticket process required.

How it works

1. Introductory call. We talk about your application, your team and what worries you most about it.
2. Access. You give us access to your repository, CI, error tracking and monitoring. We work through pull requests like any other team member - your team stays in control of what gets merged and deployed.
3. Initial review. In the first weeks we go through the codebase, the dependency tree and the infrastructure, and build the first version of the maintenance roadmap.
4. Ongoing work. From then on we work through the roadmap, react to new advisories and releases, and report back every month.

What it is not

The retainer is about the health of your application, not about building new features. If you also need feature development, a new mobile app with Hotwire Native, or a larger migration such as MySQL to PostgreSQL, we are happy to offer that as a separate project.

Summary

A Rails application stays healthy when someone looks after it continuously, not when it gets attention once every few years. With the maintenance retainer, that someone is us: we keep your stack current, secure and well tested, and your team gets a clear roadmap and a direct line to experienced Rails engineers.

Interested in a maintenance retainer for your application? Get in touch.