Get Ongoing Engineering Support for Your Custom Automations
A dedicated engineer provides ongoing maintenance for custom automation. This includes monitoring, security patches, API updates, and on-call support.
These systems connect multiple APIs and process critical data, requiring active management. Unlike SaaS tools with shared support queues, you get a single point of contact who wrote the original code. This is for businesses running workflows where a two-hour outage costs more than the support plan.
We built a document processing pipeline for a 12-person logistics firm. It uses the Claude API to extract data from invoices and syncs it to their ERP. They are on a flat monthly maintenance plan which includes a 4-hour response SLA for any processing failures.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Businesses often build internal scripts to connect systems like their CRM and billing platform. These scripts work initially but become brittle over time. When an external API like Stripe updates its endpoint from v2 to v3, the script breaks silently. There is no automated alert, so you discover the failure when accounting reports that no invoices have synced for three days.
A 25-person recruiting agency used a Python script hosted on a small server to parse resumes from an email inbox, extract skills using an LLM, and create candidate profiles in their applicant tracking system (ATS). The script ran fine for six months. Then, the ATS provider deprecated the authentication method they were using. The script started throwing 401 errors, creating a backlog of 400 unprocessed resumes before a recruiter noticed the system was down.
The core issue is a lack of production-grade practices. The script had no structured logging, no health checks, and no automated alerting. It was written to solve an immediate problem, not to run reliably for years. Without a maintenance plan, internal tools are operational risks waiting to happen. The person who wrote it often leaves, leaving behind undocumented code that nobody can fix.
How Does It Work?
Every custom automation we build includes monitoring from day one. We use structlog for structured, machine-readable JSON logs. These logs are sent to a log management service. We configure alerts that trigger on specific error codes or if a job fails to complete within its expected 60-second timeframe. An alert immediately creates a ticket and notifies us.
We deploy systems on serverless infrastructure using AWS Lambda or Vercel Functions. This architecture minimizes infrastructure management. We define all resources using Infrastructure as Code with AWS SAM templates. This means we can redeploy the entire system to a new region in under 5 minutes if there is a regional outage. Hosting costs for a typical document pipeline processing 5,000 documents per month are under $40.
We run dependency scans weekly to check for security vulnerabilities in libraries like httpx or FastAPI. We proactively update API client libraries when providers announce changes. For example, when a CRM announces a new API version, we test our integration against the new version in a staging environment 3 months before the old one is deprecated. This prevents last-minute scrambles.
When an alert fires, we have a runbook for each system. This document outlines the architecture, common failure points, and steps for diagnosis. For a lead processing system connecting a web form to a Supabase database, the first step is checking the API gateway logs for malformed requests. This systematic approach reduces the mean time to resolution from hours of guesswork to under 30 minutes of targeted investigation.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Failures Fixed in Minutes, Not Days
A 4-hour SLA and proactive monitoring mean critical workflows are never down for a full business day.
Flat Monthly Fee, No Surprise Bills
One predictable cost covers monitoring, maintenance, and support. No per-incident charges or hourly billing.
Your Code, Your Infrastructure
The system runs in your AWS account and the source is in your GitHub. We are a maintainer, not a landlord.
Proactive Updates, Zero Downtime
We patch library vulnerabilities and handle API deprecations before they become production issues.
Maintained Across Your Entire Stack
We manage connections between your CRM, ERP, and internal databases, ensuring data flows correctly end-to-end.
What Does the Process Look Like?
System Audit (Week 1)
You provide access to the existing system's code and infrastructure. We perform a full audit and deliver a report outlining current risks and a proposed monitoring setup.
Instrumentation (Week 2)
We add structured logging, health checks, and alerting to the application. You receive a pull request with the updated code for review.
Deployment (Week 3)
We deploy the instrumented version to your infrastructure and configure the monitoring dashboard and alert routing. You receive a runbook detailing the system architecture.
Ongoing Support (Starts Week 4)
The monthly maintenance plan begins. You receive weekly health summaries and instant alerts on any failures, with support provided by the engineer who instrumented the system.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How much does a monthly maintenance plan cost?
- Pricing depends on system complexity and the required service level agreement (SLA). A simple data sync between two APIs with a next-business-day response might be one price. A real-time document processing pipeline requiring a 1-hour response SLA will be more. We provide a fixed monthly quote after the initial system audit. Book a discovery call at cal.com/syntora/discover to discuss.
- What happens when an external API we rely on goes down?
- Our systems are built with resiliency patterns. For non-critical tasks, we use an exponential backoff retry mechanism. For critical data ingestion, we write failed payloads to a dead-letter queue in AWS SQS. When the external API comes back online, we can reprocess the failed jobs from the queue, preventing any data loss.
- How is this different from hiring a freelancer on Upwork?
- A freelancer can fix a bug, but Syntora provides a production support system. We implement logging, monitoring, and alerting so we are notified of problems before you are. We focus on Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and system uptime, not just hourly coding. It is the difference between a mechanic on call and a full pit crew.
- What is included in the maintenance plan?
- The plan covers monitoring, alerting, incident response, dependency updates, and API version management. It also includes up to two hours per month for minor feature enhancements or changes. This is ideal for adding a new field to a data sync or adjusting a business rule in a workflow without requiring a new project scope.
- Do we have to host the system on our infrastructure?
- Yes. You own the code and the infrastructure it runs on, which avoids vendor lock-in. We work with your existing AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts. If you do not have one, we will help you set one up. You pay the cloud provider directly, which typically costs less than $50 per month for our serverless architectures.
- What if we want to take over maintenance ourselves later?
- That is the goal. We deliver the full source code, deployment scripts (AWS SAM templates), and a detailed runbook. The runbook explains how to deploy changes, monitor logs, and handle common alerts. We can do a recorded handoff session with your technical team to walk them through the entire system so they can manage it independently.
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