What belongs in a maintenance contract?

"Maintenance" means very different things to different suppliers. Five points make the agreement verifiable.

What is included

Security updates, bug fixes, monitoring, backups. And above all: what is not. A new feature is not maintenance.

Response times

Per severity. A site being down and a typo do not need the same deadline. And state whether it applies outside office hours.

Who decides the urgency

Without an agreement each party judges differently. Define the categories in advance with examples.

What happens to unused hours

Carried over or lost? This is the point that causes the most argument and is settled in one sentence.

The report

What happened this quarter? Without a report you pay for something invisible, and that always becomes a question eventually.