Issue 02Sep 1, 2026
Who actually maintains your automation after handover?
Issue 1 was about automations that were built badly. This one is about automations built well that stop working anyway. Microsoft has a support page for one version of it: a Power Automate flow authenticates through the login of whoever built it, and once that account is closed the connections quietly stop working. Nobody touched the flow and nobody made a mistake. The fix Microsoft recommends, assigning a co-owner, only helps if somebody thought of it in advance. Two other mechanisms do the same thing on different timelines, and all three are published, expected behavior from the vendors involved. What a delivered automation usually lacks isn't a fix for any of them. It's somebody whose job is to notice.
The two failures that arrive on a schedule
Zapier turns a Zap off by itself once about 95% of its runs error over a rolling seven days. Team plans get an email warning and 24 hours before that happens, Enterprise 72 hours. That's a sensible safety feature from Zapier's side, protecting its infrastructure from a workflow stuck in a failure loop. From your side it means a workflow can go dark with no human decision behind it. The second one is slower and more certain. OpenAI publishes a minimum of six months notice before it retires a generally available model, three months for specialized variants, and as little as two weeks for a preview one. A build that was correct on delivery day can need real engineering work a year later because the ground under it moved on a published schedule.
The clock nobody puts in the contract
A fixed-price build that leans on one model carries that retirement date from the day it ships, and the two-week tier applies if the build used a preview model to get a sharper demo. The work the date creates is real engineering, and it lands whether or not anyone budgeted for it. So ask any vendor quoting you a fixed price which model the build depends on, who is watching for its deprecation notice, and what the migration would cost. Anyone who has thought about it answers in about a sentence.
"We handed it over" and "you own it" are different claims
Three specifics separate them. Does the automation run inside your account or the vendor's? If it only runs in a workspace they control, what you have is a dependency on them staying reachable. Do you hold the credentials? An API key generated under the vendor's org means revoking their access also breaks your automation. Is the logic written down somewhere that survives its author leaving? An automation exactly one person understands is already orphaned, whether or not it ran fine this morning. Get all three answered in writing before you sign, while the answers are still a negotiation.
What a retainer has to name, and what we're on the hook for
Retainers in this category run from roughly $500 to $8,000 a month, sold against exactly the failures above. One earns its cost when it names the work it covers: who watches for the silent failure, who reassigns ownership when somebody leaves, who handles the model migration and when. Ongoing support as a category, with no defined scope and no way to check whether anything was monitored, is the original accountability gap billed monthly. Ours: at handover you get the running system, full documentation, and Loom walkthroughs, held in your accounts rather than ours. Support is optional from $1,000/mo and the build is designed to keep working without it. If you inherited an automation and can't answer the ownership questions above, the $1,500 Audit answers them and hands you a fix list you keep either way.
Ask whoever built the automation you’re running right now what happens on the day the model underneath it retires. How long the answer takes tells you whether anyone has been watching.
None of this describes how every vendor handles the months after delivery. It’s what three of them have published, and what we do.
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