Compare

Every Option for Maintaining Your Software.

We'll be honest about when Services IS the right choice — and when it isn't. You deserve a clear picture before you commit.

Side by side

How the options compare.

An honest look at every realistic choice for a non-technical founder managing live software.

Feature	Do Nothing	Part-time Freelancer	Full-time Hire	In-house Team	SocioFi Services
Monthly cost	$0	$500–2,000	$8,000–15,000	$30,000+	$499–1,999
Response time	Never	1–3 days	Hours (if available)	Hours (if available)	1–24 hours (SLA)
Security patches	No	Sometimes	Sometimes	Yes	Yes
Knows your codebase	No	Sometimes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Available 24/7	No	No	No	Sometimes	Yes
Monitoring	No	No	Sometimes	Sometimes	Yes
Bug fixes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Feature additions	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Growth & Scale
Knows your history	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
One vendor accountability	No	Sometimes	No	No	Yes

Honest assessment

We turn away clients who are not a good fit. Here's how to know before you contact us.

Solo founder without a tech teamYour product is live. You have no engineer. You need someone watching it full-time without hiring full-time.
Product built by an agency that disappearedYou have running software, no documentation, and no one who knows the codebase. We audit it and take over.
In-house team overloaded with new featuresYour engineers are building — not watching. Maintenance falls through the cracks. We cover the gap.
AI agents that need human oversightYou are running agents in production and need accuracy monitoring, drift detection, and intervention when things go wrong.
Products where downtime means lost revenueEvery hour down costs you money. You need a guaranteed response time, not a best-effort arrangement.

You have a senior engineer with capacityYou probably don't need us. What you might benefit from is better infrastructure. Check Cloud.
You are pre-revenue with an MVP that barely worksStart with Studio's Rescue & Ship to get it production-ready. Come back to Services once it is live.
You need a 10-person team for a massive feature buildThat is product development, not maintenance. That is Studio territory.
You have an internal DevOps team alreadyRedundant monitoring and conflicting incident ownership is worse than neither. Your team already has this covered.
You want full-time embedded engineersWe work async. We are not embedded staff augmentation. If you need a full-time engineer on Slack, that is a different engagement.

The real numbers

The honest three-year scenario for a typical small business product — doing nothing vs. a consistent maintenance plan.

Scenario: Do nothing

Year 1$0 direct cost. Software works fine. Dependencies quietly age. No visible problems. You feel validated.
Year 2First major incident. One cascading failure — a dependency conflict, a server misconfiguration, a missed security patch. Emergency freelancer: $2,000–5,000. Lost revenue from 18 hours downtime: $8,000–15,000.
Year 3Security breach. Unpatched vulnerability exploited. Data exposure incident. Legal/compliance response: $20,000–80,000. Customer churn from lost trust: incalculable.
Total$30,000–100,000+ in reactive costs. Plus the time cost: 3–6 months of distraction during each crisis.

Scenario: SocioFi Services

Year 1$5,988–23,988/yr (Essential to Scale). Monitoring live. Weekly dependency audits. 2 security vulnerabilities patched before anyone noticed. Zero incidents.
Year 2Same cost. One potential incident detected and resolved in 90 minutes. No downtime. No emergency freelancer. No lost revenue. You barely noticed.
Year 3Same cost. Security audit found a critical CVE. Patched within 24 hours. No breach. No lawyers. No customer notifications. Clean bill of health.
Total$18,000–72,000 over 3 years. Predictable. Budgetable. Zero crisis events. Full attention on building your business.

If Services sounds like a fit, start with an audit. We will assess your codebase and tell you exactly what it needs — before you commit to a plan.