For agencies and studios
You are on the hook for systems
nobody is free to look after.
Ten, twenty, forty client products — some you built, some you inherited. The clients keep asking for changes. The work is unbillable or barely billable, it interrupts project work, and it lands on whoever is least busy that week.\n\nCapybari takes custody of those systems, so the retainer keeps paying without a developer attached to it.
The actual problem
Maintenance is a margin problem wearing a technical costume
Nobody in a studio needs convincing that maintenance is painful. What is worth saying out loud is where it shows up in the accounts.
It costs project time
The developer doing it is off something billable
A two-day maintenance job is two days not on a project with a rate attached. It rarely appears as a cost because it never gets an invoice line — it shows up later, as a project that ran over.
It lands badly
It goes to whoever is least busy, not whoever knows it
Which means someone reads a codebase they have never seen, under time pressure, for work that is not going to be billed at a rate that justifies the reading.
It accumulates
There is at least one repo nobody has opened in a year
Still running, still the client's product, still yours to answer for. Every month it is untouched, the cost of touching it goes up and the person who understood it is further away.
None of that is a tooling problem. It is a staffing problem you cannot solve at the margin the work carries.
The offer
Keep the retainer. Skip the salary behind it.
Capybari takes on the maintenance of a client system: it learns the codebase and keeps that understanding current, plans changes in plain English, builds them through gates, deploys to the client's own servers, and notices when something breaks.\n\n$50 a month for the first client system and $40 for every one after it — fifteen systems is $610 a month, not $750. Annual billing is ten months for twelve. Viewers and collaborators are free, so putting your whole team and the client in to watch costs nothing, and the AI work runs on your own subscription at no mark-up.\n\nA dormant system still costs something, because the value is that it is watched and the understanding stays current — not that changes happened this month. Tell us what you are carrying and we will tell you what it costs.
Start with the one nobody has opened
Point it at a dormant client project and read what comes back
The free thing here is not a trial. It is a document: Capy reads the repositories and writes a plain-English description of the system — what it is, what it is built from, how the parts relate, and what is wrong with it.
Costs you nothing
And needs no client conversation
If you hold the code, you can run it today. No permission to ask for, nothing to explain to a client, no commitment on the other side of it.\n\nPick the project you would least like to be asked about. That is the one where the document is worth the most.
And it is billable work
You could plausibly invoice for the output
An audit of an inherited system, written down, is something studios charge for. Whether you bill it, hand it to the client, or keep it for your own estimating is up to you.\n\nIt is also the only claim on this page you can check against your own code without taking our word for anything.
What custody actually means
The part you are currently doing at 11pm
This is the section an agency principal skips to, so it is the one with mechanisms in it rather than adjectives.
Before the merge
Gates that can reject, not just produce
Architecture, code review and a security pass run before anything joins the client's default branch. Any role can be marked as requiring a human — yours — and dependent work stops until you approve it, at every autonomy level.
The deploy
To the client's servers, with a rollback armed
A deployment target is an SSH host plus four things you write: a deploy path, a deploy command, a health check and a rollback command. Because the commands are yours, it fits the client's existing setup rather than requiring a new one.
Merged 4 branches, no conflicts
Deployed to prod-web-1 over SSH
Health check failed — /healthz returned 503 twice
Rolled back to a3f91c2 — the last commit known healthy
Investigation INV-11 opened automatically
Afterwards
The investigation opens itself
A failed health check rolls the deploy back on its own and opens an investigation with read-only access to logs and diagnostics. You get the cause written up and a follow-up request containing the fix.\n\nIt cannot change the client's server unless you grant that explicitly. Read-only is the default, not a setting.
Opened by the failed deployment of REQ-142
Read journalctl -u your-api on prod-web-1
Cause found — SCA_PROVIDER_KEY is not set on the production host
Opened REQ-143 to add the variable to the deploy configuration
The full model, including exactly what an investigation may and may not touch: the security and governance page.
What studios ask
Running client work through Capybari
How is this priced across a portfolio?
$50 a month for the first system and $40 for each one after it, so fifteen comes to $610 rather than $750, and annual billing is ten months for twelve. One licence covers a system up to 2 GB of code across 5 repositories, with 3 tasks at once and 2 deployment targets; a heavier system uses more than one. Viewers and collaborators are free. The detail is here.
Do we have to give access to client production servers?
Only for the systems you want deployed. Plenty of agencies run planning and building only and deploy through their existing process. Write access to a host is a separate, explicit grant and is never the default.
What happens when a client system breaks at 2am?
The health check fails, the rollback runs, and an investigation opens on its own with read-only access. You get the cause written up and a follow-up request with the fix — rather than a phone call, and rather than finding out from the client.
What about a client whose code we did not write?
That is the normal case. Capy reads the project before it plans anything, and the role contracts instruct every specialist to make the smallest safe change and reuse the patterns already there. Inherited codebases are the input it was built for.
Can we bring our own AI subscription?
Yes. Compute is separate from the custody price and passed through at cost — bring your own subscription at no markup, or buy credits. It is deliberately not folded in, because a busy month would then look like a price rise.
Start here
Point Capy at the client project nobody has opened
The dormant one. The one you would least like to be asked about this quarter. Capy reads it and writes back a plain-English description of what it is, what it depends on, and what is wrong with it.\n\nIt costs nothing, it needs no client conversation if you hold the code, and it commits you to nothing afterwards.