Softment

AI Development

AI Maintenance & LLMOps Retainer

AI features need ongoing care: evals to prevent regressions, monitoring for failures, prompt/version control, cost controls, and security patching. This retainer keeps your LLM/RAG/agent system stable while you ship improvements safely.

First step1–2 week opportunity sprint
Entry engagement$3k–$5k USD
Security-first AI integrations • Evals + logging + guardrails included

Overview

What this service is

A monthly retainer that covers reliability and iteration for production AI systems (agents, RAG knowledge bases, automations, and LLM features).

We maintain a measurable quality loop: eval sets, regression checks, and monitoring so changes don’t break silently.

You get predictable support for incidents, cost tuning, and security hardening—plus documented changes your team can audit.

Standard

AI delivery standard

Quality and safety practices we ship with AI builds so the system stays measurable, maintainable, and production-ready.

Logging + tracing

Conversation and tool traces with request IDs, error visibility, and debug-friendly runbooks.

Guardrails + safety

Tool allowlists, PII-safe patterns, refusal behavior, and escalation routes for edge cases.

Evals + regression tests

Golden queries, scorecards, and regression checks so quality improves over time instead of drifting.

Cost + latency controls

Caching, prompt discipline, retrieval tuning, and routing so your app stays fast and predictable at scale.

Documentation + handoff

Architecture notes, environment setup, and next-step roadmap so your team can iterate safely after launch.

Security-first integration

Secrets isolation, role-based access, audit-friendly actions, and minimal data retention by design.

Benefits

What you get

Prevent regressions with evals and regression checks

Keep costs predictable with routing and caching tuning

Improve reliability with traces, alerts, and runbooks

Ship safe iterations with prompt/version control

Reduce security risk with regular hardening

Get incident support when workflows fail

Features

What we deliver

Monitoring + alerting

Tracing, error monitoring, and key KPIs (latency, tool errors, cost) with actionable alerts.

Evals + regression suite

Maintain test sets and scorecards so releases improve quality instead of drifting.

Prompt + version management

Prompt changes tracked and reviewed with rollout notes and safe fallback behavior.

Cost + latency optimization

Caching, routing (small vs large model), retrieval tuning, and token discipline to control spend.

Security patching + guardrail updates

Prompt injection defenses, tool allowlists, RBAC boundaries, and safe action constraints kept current.

Monthly delivery notes

A clear summary of changes, metrics movement, and next-step recommendations your team can audit.

Proof

Built for production

Starter — $900/mo

Monitoring + weekly QA checks, prompt/version updates, and 1–2 small improvements per month.

Growth — $2,400/mo

Evals + regression suite maintenance, cost tuning, incident response support, and 4–6 improvements per month.

Scale — $4,800/mo

Multi-workflow support, permission/guardrail hardening, deeper observability, and prioritized delivery.

Process

How we work

1
3–5 days

Baseline

Audit current system, metrics, and failure modes.

2
2–5 days

Instrument

Monitoring, traces, and KPI dashboards.

3
2–6 days

Evaluate

Eval set + regression checks for core intents.

4
Ongoing

Iterate

Monthly improvements with release notes and rollbacks.

Tech Stack

Technologies we use

Core

Tracing + monitoringEvaluation testsPrompt/versioningCaching (Redis)

Tools

Queues + retriesRBAC + tool allowlistsRAG retrieval tuningIncident runbooks

Services

Sentry / logsCost dashboards

Use Cases

Who this is for

Stabilize a RAG knowledge base

Improve retrieval quality and reduce wrong answers with evals, tuning, and safer fallbacks.

Keep an agent safe as tools expand

Maintain allowlists, approvals, and RBAC boundaries as new tool actions are added.

Reduce LLM spend at scale

Add routing and caching so usage grows without cost surprises.

Incident support for workflow failures

Debug tool failures and broken webhooks quickly with traces and runbooks.

Continuous improvements

Ship small iterations safely each month with measurable outcomes and clear handoff.

Implementation Patterns

How we frame common AI workflows

Illustrative patterns only—not client case studies, endorsements, or production-result claims.

Regulated mobile data workflow pattern

Challenge: Sensitive data workflows need explicit access boundaries, traceability, and documented operating responsibilities.

Approach: Threat-model the workflow, map authorization rules, select encryption controls, and define auditable state transitions.

Validation: Test access boundaries and recovery paths, record residual risk, and obtain any required independent compliance assessment.

Large knowledge-base retrieval pattern

Challenge: Long, mixed-format source collections need traceable retrieval and safe behavior when evidence is weak.

Approach: Evaluate hybrid retrieval, reranking, citations, structured outputs, and defined fallback or human-review paths.

Validation: Use a representative offline evaluation set and report citation quality, latency, and cost under documented test conditions.

Operations automation pattern

Challenge: Approval and system-sync workflows need deterministic controls around exceptions, retries, and ownership.

Approach: Model the workflow, add validation and approval gates, and use AI only for bounded classification or extraction tasks.

Validation: Baseline manual steps, test exception paths and audit logs, then compare pilot measurements before considering wider rollout.

Decision Guides

Not sure which to choose?

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

No. We can take over maintenance for existing LLM/RAG/agent systems after a short baseline review.

Yes. The retainer includes support for production issues. Exact SLA can be agreed based on plan.

We maintain eval sets and regression checks that run before changes are released, then track metrics over time.

Yes. We optimize prompts, add caching, route requests between models, and tune retrieval to reduce tokens and latency.

Yes. We track prompt versions, implement safe rollouts, and document changes with measurable outcomes.

Yes. You receive delivery notes covering changes, metrics, and recommended next steps.

Ready to start?

Want help with AI maintenance retainer?

Share your requirements and we’ll reply with next steps and a clear plan.

We’ll review the context and reply with a practical next step.