Emergency repair
The site is down, the checkout has stopped, or a deployment broke something. Triage first, root cause after.
Two different jobs, in this order: stop the loss, then find the cause. Reversing that order is how a two-hour outage becomes a two-day one.
Typical calls
- A white screen after a plugin or PHP update.
- Checkout completing without an order, or orders arriving without payment.
- A deployment that worked on staging and not in production.
- Email that silently stopped being delivered.
- A site that works for logged-out visitors and not for anyone else.
How it runs
I need hosting access and a description of what changed. First hour is triage: get you back to a working state, even if that state is temporary. After that, the actual cause, in writing, and the change that keeps it from recurring.
What it costs and why
A call-out fee of 600 EUR covers the first two hours, and further time is 250 EUR an hour. Outside working hours, at weekends and on public holidays those figures rise by half.
That is more than my ordinary rate, and deliberately so. You are not buying hours, you are buying the right to interrupt whatever I was doing and go to the front of the queue. If the site is a shop, an hour of downtime usually costs more than the whole call-out.
Every figure is confirmed before anything starts. Nothing lands on an invoice as a surprise, and if the answer is that it can wait until Monday for a quarter of the price, I will say so.