Operations plans
Once your software is live, someone has to keep it running. On an operations plan, that's an Exalynt engineering team, which stays accountable for monitoring, routine production care, and responding when something goes wrong. Or you can operate your software yourself, without buying a plan. This page explains both choices, what each plan commits to, and how plans are priced.
This page explains how Exalynt works. It is not a client agreement. These plans and prices are Exalynt's launch configuration and may change.
At a glance
- Exalynt offers two things. Engineering Capacity is bought in weekly Flex, Core, or Dedicated blocks, for building and changing software. Operations plans are recurring monthly services for products Exalynt operates in production.
- There are three plans: Essential, Standard, and Extended, from $399 a month per product.
- A plan is required for every product Exalynt operates in production. If you operate a product yourself, you don't need one.
- People respond during your plan's coverage hours. Automated monitoring runs continuously, but no plan includes 24/7 human response.
- Quiet and difficult months cost the same. Plans aren't incident-hour buckets, and there are no overages.
- Infrastructure and third-party services are additional, passed through at cost, with no markup.
- Nothing recurring starts until it's live.
What's on your bill
Three things, never bundled together:
Who operates your software
You choose, and you don't have to decide before we start building. Capacity costs the same either way.
| Self Operated | Operated by Exalynt | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs production (monitoring, backups, patching, incidents) | Your team | Exalynt, within your plan's coverage |
| Operations plan | Not needed | Required, one for each product |
| Infrastructure and third-party services | You pay providers | Additional, passed through at cost |
| Engineering Capacity | Same price | Same price |
| Who owns the software and source code | You | You |
| Available for | Any software | Products Exalynt accepts, after onboarding |
With Self Operated software, Exalynt is still available through Engineering Capacity to change, improve, or troubleshoot it. There's no recurring Exalynt charge just because the software exists.
Your hosting provider
You can use hosting providers such as Railway or AWS while Exalynt operates the application. A provider keeps its own platform running. It doesn't know what your application is supposed to do, whether a scheduled job quietly stopped, or what to do when a release breaks something. That's the part an operations plan covers: an engineering team stays accountable for the application running on that hosting.
The plans
Each plan defines a specific set of production responsibilities and coverage commitments for one product.
| Responsibility | Essential | Standard | Extended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price per product | $399 | $749 | $1,399 |
| Human response coverage | Weekdays, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. | Weekdays, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. | Every day, 8 a.m.–8 p.m. |
| Critical incident response target | Within 1 business day | Within 4 covered hours | Within 1 covered hour |
| Continuous automated monitoring | Included | Included | Included |
| Availability, application errors, infrastructure health, and backup alerts | Included | Included | Included |
| Workflow monitoring | Basic failure alerts | Agreed key integrations, scheduled jobs, and business workflows | Standard plus synthetic checks of agreed critical user journeys |
| Incident handling | Investigation and routine service restoration during coverage | Essential with faster response and escalation | Standard with primary and backup escalation during extended coverage |
| Critical incident communication | Acknowledgment and resolution summary | Updates at least every 2 covered hours | Updates at least every covered hour |
| Backup oversight | Check backup completion and maintain restore instructions | Essential plus quarterly restore verification | Standard plus monthly restore verification |
| Operational health review | Quarterly | Monthly | Monthly plus review after critical incidents |
| Recovery planning | Document restore procedure and known limitations | Agree recovery objectives and identify gaps | Standard plus a recovery exercise every six months |
| 24/7 human response | Not included | Not included | Not included |
Infrastructure and third-party service costs are additional and passed through at cost.
Choosing a plan
- Essential suits a product where a critical problem can wait for working hours and up to a business day for a first response.
- Standard suits a product your business relies on through the working day, where you want a faster response, more frequent updates, and monitoring of the integrations, jobs, and workflows that matter most.
- Extended suits a product that needs people watching over it beyond the working week, including weekends and holidays.
Coverage and response targets
Coverage
Automated monitoring runs continuously. Human response happens during your plan's Coverage window.
- Coverage uses a timezone named in your service agreement.
- Essential and Standard exclude a published holiday calendar. Extended includes weekends and holidays.
- No plan includes 24/7 human response. Outside coverage, monitoring keeps running, but nobody is committed to respond until coverage next begins.
Critical incidents
A critical incident means one of these:
- production is unavailable,
- a core business workflow is unusable without a practical workaround, or
- there is suspected active data loss or compromise.
What a response target means
A response target means a person has acknowledged the incident and started investigating. It doesn't guarantee when the incident will be resolved. Only time inside the coverage window counts toward the target:
| Plan | Critical incident raised | Covered time counted | Response target reached by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | Friday at 4 p.m. | One covered hour on Friday, then three from 9 a.m. on Monday | Monday at noon |
| Standard | Saturday at 10 a.m. | Nothing until 9 a.m. on Monday, then four covered hours | Monday at 1 p.m. |
| Extended | Tuesday at 10 p.m. | Nothing until 8 a.m. on Wednesday, then one covered hour | Wednesday at 9 a.m. |
These examples assume Monday isn't on the holiday calendar, with times in the timezone your service agreement names.
Response targets are service targets, not contractual SLAs, and no penalties or credits attach to them. Exalynt doesn't promise guaranteed uptime or recovery times.
What every plan includes
The monthly service is actual production care, whichever plan you choose:
- Investigating production alerts.
- Routine restoration actions, such as service restarts, deployment rollbacks, and backup restores where applicable.
- Maintaining the means to operate: monitoring, production access, secrets handling, operating instructions, and ownership handoffs.
- Routine maintenance, including certificate renewal, credential rotation, and compatible patches through established procedures.
- A named owning team and an escalation path (Engineering Teams).
- Tracking operational risks and recommending improvements.
Backup and recovery responsibilities apply to the systems and data agreed for your product. Recovery objectives must be supported by the application's architecture and infrastructure, so where they aren't, recovery planning identifies the gap rather than promising around it.
What needs Engineering Capacity
Capacity funds change. Operations funds keeping production software running.
Routine investigation and restoration are included in your plan. You don't buy anything extra for us to look into an alert, roll back a bad release, or restart a service. These are scoped separately:
- substantial code changes and new features,
- major upgrades and migrations,
- redesign, and
- new resilience capabilities.
If getting back to healthy needs one of those, we'll restore what we can through routine actions and tell you what the rest would take before you buy it.
Where delivered work failed agreed requirements, Exalynt's correction policy takes precedence over this page.
Onboarding
Initial production setup, and taking over an application Exalynt isn't familiar with, both need separately scoped onboarding. A plan covers operating a product once it's set up to be operated. It doesn't cover getting it there.
How plans are priced
Plans price accepted responsibility, coverage, and readiness. They are not incident-hour buckets.
- A quiet month earns the same monthly fee. You're paying for a team to be accountable and ready, not for the number of things that went wrong.
- A difficult month prompts investigation and reliability improvement, not an automatic overage or tier increase.
- There are no per-feature fees or percentages. Adding features or capabilities doesn't add line items to a plan.
Because a difficult month doesn't earn Exalynt anything extra, our incentives point toward software that stays healthy.
When your plan can change
A plan changes only through an agreed change in operating requirements, such as broader coverage, greater business criticality, or expanded operating scope. Poor engineering alone doesn't justify a higher bill. A change applies going forward, never to past months.
When you're billed
- 1. BuildingNo operations planYou buy capacity as usual. Development, preview, QA, and staging environments never start a plan.
- 2. Goes livePlan startsWhen the software enters real production use and Exalynt accepts responsibility for operating it. Never retroactively.
- 3. RunningThe same each monthA quiet month and a difficult month cost the same. The plan changes only when you agree a change in operating requirements.
- 4. Handed offPlan stopsWhen Exalynt no longer operates it, whether it's retired, or you or another operator take it over.
A plan starts when your software enters real production use and Exalynt accepts responsibility for operating it. "Production" doesn't have to mean public: an internal tool your team relies on, a scheduled job, or an automation doing real work all count.
If you spend a year building before launch, you pay for capacity (and any infrastructure, at cost) during that year, and the plan starts at launch. There's no back-charge for the build.
Why it isn't based on your cloud bill
We do not profit from unnecessary infrastructure.
A plan's price isn't a percentage of cloud spend, traffic, or data size. If it were, Exalynt would earn more as your bill got bigger, and less when we made it smaller.
Because it isn't, the incentives point the right way. If we cut your infrastructure bill, your plan's price doesn't rise to make up for it. So we have every reason to cut unnecessary spend, remove unused resources, choose sensibly sized services, and keep things simple.
Changing who operates the software
You can take over operating your software at any time. The plan stops when Exalynt stops operating it.
- No lock-in: no minimum term, exit fee, or software buyout.
- Handoff included: source code, data, and the normal deployment and configuration artifacts. Substantial migration work uses Engineering Capacity.
- Coming back: a product you've been operating yourself can move onto a plan later, after separately scoped onboarding.
Capacity costs the same whoever operates the software, so no one is kept on an Exalynt plan by a discount they'd lose by leaving.
Frequently asked questions
How much will operations cost me?
$399, $749, or $1,399 a month per product, for Essential, Standard, or Extended once your software is live, plus infrastructure and third-party services at cost. See The plans.
Do I have to buy an operations plan?
Only for a product Exalynt operates in production. You can operate your products yourself without one, and still buy Engineering Capacity whenever you want help. See Who operates your software.
Will someone respond in the middle of the night?
Not on any current plan. Automated monitoring runs continuously, but no plan includes 24/7 human response. People respond during your plan's coverage hours, and only that time counts toward a response target. See Coverage.
Does a response target mean the problem is fixed by then?
No. It means a person has acknowledged the incident and started investigating. It doesn't guarantee when the incident will be resolved. See What a response target means.
Do plans guarantee uptime, or pay credits if a target is missed?
No. Response targets are service targets, not contractual SLAs with penalties or credits, and Exalynt doesn't promise guaranteed uptime or recovery times.
If something breaks, is fixing it extra?
Investigating it and routine restoration, such as a restart, a rollback, or a backup restore where applicable, are part of your plan. If the real fix needs substantial code changes or something else that's scoped separately, that's Engineering Capacity, and we'll tell you before you buy it. Where delivered work failed agreed requirements, Exalynt's correction policy takes precedence.
Will a difficult month cost me more?
No. There's no automatic overage or tier increase. A difficult month prompts investigation and reliability improvement. See How plans are priced.
Why do I pay the same in a quiet month?
Because you're paying for accepted responsibility, coverage, and readiness, not incident hours. A quiet month is what everyone should want, so it earns Exalynt the same monthly fee as any other.
Can Exalynt move my product to a higher plan?
Only through an agreed change in operating requirements, such as broader coverage, greater business criticality, or expanded operating scope. Poor engineering alone doesn't justify a higher bill. See When your plan can change.
Does adding a feature raise the price?
Not on its own. There are no per-feature fees. A plan changes only if you agree a change in operating requirements.
Does my price go up as I get more customers or data?
Not just because your cloud bill grows. Your infrastructure bill may grow with real usage, and you pay that at cost. Your plan's price isn't based on it. See Why it isn't based on your cloud bill.
Can I keep using Railway or AWS?
Yes. You can use hosting providers such as Railway or AWS while Exalynt operates the application. Their costs are passed through at cost, like other infrastructure. See Your hosting provider.
Do I have to decide who operates the software before you start?
No. Capacity costs the same either way, so you can decide when the software is close to going live.
Do development and staging environments count?
No. Local development, development, preview, QA, testing, and staging environments never start a plan. Their infrastructure may still be passed through at cost.
Does capacity cost more or less if Exalynt operates my software?
Neither. There is one price for each block, whoever operates the software. See Engineering Capacity.
What happens if I decide to operate the software myself later?
The plan stops when Exalynt stops operating it. There's no exit fee or buyout, a standard handoff is included, and your capacity price stays the same. See Changing who operates the software.
Can Exalynt operate software it didn't build?
Yes, after separately scoped onboarding. Taking over an unfamiliar application means learning it well enough to accept responsibility for it, and that work isn't part of a plan.
Does Exalynt mark up infrastructure?
No. Infrastructure and third-party services are billed at cost, with no markup, resale margin, or percentage. They aren't Exalynt revenue.