What care looks like after launch

When SYCGeeks ships your site, store, or app, the record in your merchant dashboard moves to launched. That is a status, not a closed file. Receipts, the signed quote, the workflow steps, and the notes field stay on that same project. We do not ask you to open a new login, invent a ticket number, or retell the brief to a stranger on Monday. The people who built the checkout still own the next hour of work.

Going live always includes a support window for defects on what we shipped. The written terms start that window at 30 days. On a denser build — bilingual checkout, Square hardware plus a custom storefront, an API that moves inventory — we keep the window open up to 90 days because those products fail in ways that take a real week of traffic to show. The window is for things that broke, not things you thought of later.

Care is the optional layer after that window. Monthly care is $450 CAD. Yearly care is $4,500 CAD, which is ten months priced and two months included. Both keep hosting watched, cover small copy and dependency updates, reserve one studio hour each month, and leave a written note in your dashboard of what changed. You can add care at checkout when you buy the project, or attach it later from the same record.

A store without someone watching the processor is a weekend problem waiting for Monday. Payment webhooks, certificate renewals, and a Square appointment calendar that stops confirming do not send a polite email first. They fail silently, usually on a Saturday in Vancouver when a campaign is already live. Care exists so that silence has a human attached to it, on Pacific time, who already knows your stack.

If production is down today, do not wait for the reserved hour. Call +1 (672) 200-7924 on a weekday. Write admin@sycgeeks.ca with the project name, the URL that fails, and whether English, French, or both are broken. Use the project notes for anything that can wait until the next booked session. Three doors, one studio, one project.

A defect is something we shipped that does not do the job described in the quote. Checkout that fails on a French receipt is a defect. A keyboard path that traps focus in the cookie banner is a defect. GST calculated on the wrong province after we agreed the tax table is a defect. An image that blurs on a retina phone because we exported the wrong asset is a defect. These are not taste notes. They are the product being wrong.

A new idea is not a defect. A second marketplace, a language you did not buy, a redesigned checkout, a new collection, extra product stills, or a membership you mentioned in week nine are new scope. We will not fold those into the launch window or into the reserved care hour and send a surprise invoice later. That is how trust dies. The answer is a published add-on on the same project, at the care rate if you are on care, at the standard rate if you are not.

How you report a defect matters. Write the URL, the language, the browser, and the exact step. “Checkout feels off” wastes the hour. “On /fr/paiement, Safari on iPhone 15, Apple Pay returns a blank receipt and the order does not appear in Square” is a defect we can reproduce before lunch. Attach a screenshot. If it only happens after a refund, say so. We would rather spend twenty minutes reproducing than two days guessing.

Bilingual products get a tighter defect test. A French path that still speaks English in the error state is a Canadian product bug, not a translation leftover. Legal pages, tax lines, email receipts, and the empty-cart message must be correct in both official languages if you bought both. We re-test those surfaces inside the window. We do not treat a machine dump with accents as a second site.

If you are on care when the window ends, defects that appear later still come through the reserved hour or through a weekday call if money is moving. If you are not on care, post-window defects on our work are still our problem when they are clearly ours — a dependency we shipped, a certificate we control, a webhook we wired. A feature you now want is not that category. Ask, and we will say which bucket you are in in one sentence.

Monthly studio care is $450 CAD, billed in Canadian dollars like every other line at checkout. It is not an insurance policy and it is not an unlimited bucket of design. It buys four concrete things: hosting and uptime watch, small copy and dependency updates, one reserved studio hour each month, and a note in your project of what changed. If a request does not fit those four lines, it is a published add-on or a new quote, still on the same project.

Hosting watch means we notice when the site, the certificate, or the job that talks to Square or Stripe stops answering. We watch the surfaces that move money first: checkout, refunds, appointment confirmation, inventory sync. A marketing page that 404s after you renamed a slug is usually a small copy update. A webhook that silently drops paid orders is an incident. Those two requests do not have the same urgency, and we will not pretend they do.

Small copy and dependency updates are the quiet work that keeps a Canadian site from rotting. A price that changed in CAD, a service name your college now requires, a cookie banner label, a Next.js or Shopify dependency that has a real security fix — those belong in care. Rewriting the homepage, adding a third language, or restyling the brand is not small copy. If you are unsure, put the request in the notes. We will answer with “reserved hour” or with the add-on name and the CAD number.

The reserved studio hour is one hour of our calendar, each month, already paid. It is for defects that appeared after the window, for the copy and dependency work above, and for a short working session if you need a human to look at the live product with you. It is not eight hours of new pages smuggled into four weekly “quick” calls. Unused time does not pile into a bank you cash in December. Yearly care still grants the hour each month; it does not let you spend twelve hours in November.

The dashboard note is part of the product. After we use the hour or patch a dependency, we write what changed, in language the next operator can read. “Updated GST on the Nova Scotia shipping path and redeployed Friday 14:10 Pacific” is a note. “Tweaked a few things!!” is not. You should be able to open the project six months later and know why the tax table moved. If we cannot write the note, the work is not finished.

Yearly care is $4,500 CAD on one invoice. Monthly is $450 CAD times twelve, which is $5,400 CAD. The difference is two months included. Finance teams that close a fiscal year in CAD usually prefer the single line. You still get hosting watch, small updates, the reserved hour each month, and dashboard notes. You also get priority when that hour is scheduled, which matters in November when every Canadian retailer suddenly wants a landing page.

Choose yearly if the product is already the way you sell — a store that takes CAD, a booking calendar that must stay up, an API that talks to a warehouse. Choose monthly if you are still deciding whether this site is the real one, or if a grant, a lease, or a college year makes a twelve-month commitment dishonest. We would rather you pay month to month than pretend you will be here in August.

The yearly invoice is still CAD, still the number on the quote, still subject to the processor’s Canadian fee if you pay by card or PayPal. We do not convert it to USD on the receipt and we do not add a “convenience” line. If your board needs a PDF in French, say so on the note. A Canadian studio that cannot issue a French receipt for a yearly care invoice is not finished with its own homework.

Priority scheduling does not mean we abandon other clients. It means your reserved hour is booked before non-care requests for the same week, and before a net-new discovery call that could have waited. If checkout is down, priority is irrelevant: everyone with a live processor gets the weekday phone line. Yearly care is not a faster 911. It is a calmer calendar for the work that is not on fire.

You can start monthly and switch to yearly on a renewal. You cannot get a silent refund for unused hours. You cannot transfer the year onto a second brand without a written note, because care is attached to a product we already understand. If you launch a second property, that is a second project and, if you want it watched, a second care line or a conversation about whether one hour can honestly cover both.

The useful test is one sentence: does this restore what you already bought, or does it change what you bought? Restore belongs in the reserved hour. Change is a published add-on. “The French receipt dropped the TVQ line” restores. “Add a wholesale checkout for retailers in Alberta” changes. “Bump Next.js because the advisory is real” restores. “Build a members area” changes. If you cannot say the sentence, write the request anyway. We will say the bucket.

Published add-ons live on the care page and on the launched project in your dashboard. They are priced in CAD with a standard rate and a care rate about 25 percent lower. An extra page is $2,400 CAD standard and $1,800 CAD on care. An extra language pass is $1,800 / $1,350. A scoped checkout change is $3,200 / $2,400. Product stills are $1,200 / $900. A new collection is $2,800 / $2,100. Eight reserved hours are $1,600 / $1,200 when the monthly hour is not enough.

You pay the add-on on that project. We set status from launched back to active, keep the history, and work the same workflow you already know. We do not open a second thread with a project manager you have never met. Care members see the lower number at checkout. If you are not on care, you still buy the add-on — you just pay the standard CAD price. Care is optional. Honesty about scope is not.

We will not silently fold extra weeks into care. If a “small copy update” becomes a new information architecture, we stop and write the add-on name. If the reserved hour is used up and the defect is still our defect, we finish the defect — we do not hold a broken French receipt hostage for an eight-hour block. The line is purpose, not a stopwatch used against you. The stopwatch exists so a new homepage does not hide inside “care.”

If the ask is larger than any published add-on — a second app, a marketplace, a custom API you did not buy — we write a new CAD quote on the same account and, when it is truly a new product, a new project record. We still do not make you re-introduce the company. We do make you approve a number before anyone writes production code. Handshake scope is how studios go quiet and invoices go strange.

Hosting watch is not a marketing uptime badge. It is someone at this Vancouver studio noticing that the certificate is ten days from expiry, that the Square webhook last succeeded on Thursday, or that the French checkout route started returning a 500 after a dependency bump. We watch the production host, the jobs that talk to processors, and the appointment path if you booked Square through us. We do not watch a third-party blog you bolted on without telling us.

The dangerous failure is the silent one. A theme that looks fine and a processor that stopped capturing CAD is how you sell a jacket twice or take a deposit you cannot refund cleanly. Care means we look at the jobs that move money on a cadence, not only when you scream. If we change a retry, rotate a key, or pin a dependency, that change is written in your dashboard the same day. Invisible operations are how products rot.

You still own your Square, Stripe, or PayPal account. We do not take payouts on your behalf. Watch does not mean we can see your bank. It means we can see whether the integration we built is still completing a real Canadian order. Before launch we place a test order, refund it, and read the receipt in both languages if you bought both. After launch, care is the cheaper way to keep doing a smaller version of that test when the stack moves.

If you host somewhere we do not control — a client IT team, a university, a professional college portal — say so in the brief and again when care starts. We can watch what we can reach. We cannot promise a 3 a.m. patch on a server whose password lives on a sticky note in another city. The honest version of care in that case is the reserved hour plus a written escalation path, not a fake SLA.

When money is actually stuck — paid and not fulfilled, refunded and still captured, appointments vanishing — call. Pacific time, weekdays, +1 (672) 200-7924. Put the same facts in admin@sycgeeks.ca so the person who picks up the phone is not starting from zero. Care does not replace the fire line. Care makes the fire rarer and the note afterward useful.

The merchant dashboard is the system of record for the relationship, not a chat app. Each project has a status — intake, active, review, paused, launched — a progress bar during a build, and a notes field for what is true this week. Care work uses that same notes field. After a reserved hour we write the change, the environment, and the date in Pacific time. You should not have to search email for “did we bump Stripe?”

Write notes like an operator handing a file to the next person. “Waiting on product photos from Jane, expected Friday” is useful. “Looks good!!” is not. “College requires the licence number in the footer on both languages by 1 November” is useful. If two people can approve, name the one who can actually say yes. Content delay is still the main reason Canadian sites slip, including after launch when a price list lives in a spreadsheet.

Do not bury a new brief inside an old project’s notes. A second brand, a new app, or a store in another province that needs its own tax story is a conversation and often a new quote. A small ask on the live product belongs in the notes or in a booked session. If you paste a 40-page RFP into the launched project, we will stop and ask which sentence is this month’s work. Invisible briefs are how care hours vanish.

Receipts sit beside the notes. The care invoice, the launch payments, and any add-on you buy should be findable on that project. The number you approved is the number you paid. If a processor fee appears, it is the processor’s Canadian fee, not a studio surcharge we hid in USD. If something looks wrong on a French receipt, that is a defect — tell us with the URL and the language.

Students and extra operators you add later should be able to read the file. That is why we keep descriptions short and factual. Care is cheaper than a forensic reconstruction of Slack. If you ever leave the company, the next person should open the dashboard and know the stack, the processor, the languages, and the last change. That is the whole point of writing things down in Vancouver instead of performing busyness in a thread.

Care is optional. You can buy the project only. Launch still includes the defect window. After that, new work is a published add-on at the standard CAD rate. Many clients add monthly care at checkout because they already know a Sunday checkout failure will cost more than $450 CAD. Others wait a month, feel the silence, and attach care from the launched project. Both are honest. Pretending care is included in the build fee is not.

Add care from checkout when you buy the site, or later from the same project. Yearly is the better line if your finance team wants one CAD invoice and two months included. Monthly is the better line if the product might change shape. We do not auto-upgrade you. We do not quietly convert a monthly plan into a year when a campaign starts. The SKU you pay is the SKU you have.

If you need to pause, write us. Either side may end the engagement in writing if the other does not perform; you pay for work completed to that date. Pausing care means hosting watch and the reserved hour stop at the end of the period you already paid. The project remains launched in your account. Add-ons remain available at the standard rate. Defects that are clearly ours do not become your problem because a calendar ticked over.

Three doors remain. Call +1 (672) 200-7924 on a weekday if production is down, a launch is today, or a student cannot get in. Write admin@sycgeeks.ca with the brief, the deadline, and the systems you already pay for when you want a CAD number. Book a Square appointment on Pacific time if you would rather speak before you write. Bring the same facts you would put in an email. We will not spend the hour guessing the product.

Read the companion guide on more work after launch when you already know you want a page, a language, or a checkout change. Read accessibility and PIPEDA if the next ask is a chatbot, a tracker, or a form that a professional college will review. Read invoices in CAD if your board is still asking why the quote and the checkout are not in US dollars. The library is the long version of what we say on a call. The call is for heat. The notes are for truth.