Services

Maintenance for the software that runs your business

Somebody built it, somebody left, and now it runs your operations — that system is our specialty.

Every established company has one: the application a vendor or a former employee built years ago, that now quietly runs invoicing or production or logistics, that nobody fully understands and everybody is afraid to touch. Software maintenance is our name for adopting such systems responsibly. We start with an archaeology phase — reading the code, mapping the infrastructure, writing down what was never documented — then stabilise: monitoring, backups, dependency updates, an environment where changes can be tested. From there the system gets a normal life again: bugs fixed with regression tests, security patches applied, small features added on request, performance restored where years of data slowed it down. Our Romanian team does this across stacks old and new, under EU support contracts with defined response times — so the scariest system in your company becomes just another maintained asset.

Let’s talk about your project

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office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247

What you get

Undocumented systems adopted

We specialise in code without documentation or original authors — the recovery of understanding is a structured process, not guesswork.

Stability before change

Monitoring, tested backups and a safe staging environment come first, so every later fix happens with a net underneath.

Response times in writing

Support tiers with contractual reaction times for critical, major and minor issues — you know what happens when something breaks at month-end.

What a maintenance retainer includes

A documented map of the system as it actually is — services, databases, scheduled jobs, integrations and the credentials nobody wrote down — produced in the first weeks and kept current afterwards. Monitoring and alerting, so failures are found by software rather than by a user phoning the office. Backups with rehearsed restores. A test environment where changes can be verified before they touch production.

Then the ongoing work: defects fixed with regression tests that stop them returning, security and dependency updates applied on a schedule, small enhancements delivered from an agreed bank of hours, and performance restored where years of accumulated data have slowed things down. Response times are written into the contract by severity, so an outage does not begin with a negotiation about priority.

What it costs, indicatively

Four brackets, set by what the application keeps running. A stable business application in moderate use: from €300 a month. A platform with active users and availability requirements: from €500 a month. Critical systems with many integrations: €800–2,000 a month. Rare interventions with no retainer: €40–70 an hour. The two monthly thresholds do not contradict each other — for custom software the governing rule is 15–20% of the development cost per year, which on a €20,000 application is roughly €300 a month, while the €500 threshold describes platforms whose build already cost tens of thousands.

On top of the retainer sit the running costs: hosting at €20–80 a month on a VPS or €50–300 a month on managed cloud, third-party licences, and — where the application uses AI — €20–500 a month for model usage. The bracket is fixed after the takeover audit, not before it.

Frequently asked questions

The developer who built our system disappeared. Where do we start?

With securing access: source code, servers, domains, databases. Then our audit maps state and risks. Within a few weeks you have documentation, working backups and a team that can safely change the system again.

Maintain the old system or rewrite it?

Maintain first, almost always — stabilising is cheaper and buys time to decide calmly. We give you a factual assessment of remaining lifespan, and if a rewrite is warranted, it proceeds gradually alongside the running system.

Do you maintain applications in older technologies?

Yes — older PHP, .NET Framework and Java on the legacy side, alongside React, Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, REST APIs and Docker on the current one. Business software does not stop mattering because its stack aged; we keep it safe while you decide its future.