Takeover Audit of Existing Automations: what happens after the automation is built
Anyone can build an automation. The question that decides whether it was worth buying is what happens the first time it breaks at 5pm on a Friday.
02:14, the sync stalls. You find out from us at 02:15, not from a customer on Monday.
What it actually does
Every flow emits a heartbeat, a missing heartbeat pages a human, incidents are logged with a cause, and the month is summarised in numbers you can act on.
Monitoring, alerting, on-call, incident response and a monthly report across every automation you own, whoever built it. In practice, Takeover Audit of Existing Automations is the version of that we deploy when a business needs the result rather than a project. Our own audit procedure applied to whatever you already have, whoever built it, including the parts nobody documented.
Why businesses ask for this
An automation nobody watches is a liability with good intentions. The difference between a clever build and a dependable one is entirely in what happens after launch.
The people who get the most out of it: businesses inheriting automations from a departed staff member or agency.
- Failures found by us, not by your customer
- A number to call when something is wrong
- A monthly report you can actually read
How we build it, step by step
The sequence below is the one we follow on every operate and report build. It is deliberately boring, because the interesting version is the one that breaks in month three.
- Instrument every automation with a health check it must pass
- Route alerts to a person with an agreed response time
- Log incidents with cause and fix, not just with a timestamp
- Report monthly on volume, delivery, failures and cost
What we change before it goes live
A reference implementation is a starting line, not a product. Every one we deploy gets the same treatment:
- Your numbers, your sender identity and your wording, so nothing reads as generic
- Secrets moved out of the code and into managed configuration
- Retries, rate limits and idempotency, so a hiccup never sends twice
- Structured logging and alerting, so a failure is noticed by us and not by a customer
- Consent, opt-out and record-keeping built in rather than bolted on
- Source control, a staging environment and a rollback that takes a minute
Compliance and risk
The common failure is silence: an automation that stopped three weeks ago and nobody noticed. Everything we run has a heartbeat, and a missing heartbeat pages someone.
The technical foundation
Health checks on every flow, alert routing to a human, an incident log, and a monthly rollup of volume, delivery and failures.
What it costs
Three ways to buy this, and the honest recommendation is usually the middle one:
- Starter build, from $2,500 — we build it, hand it over and warrant it for 30 days. Suits a business with someone technical in-house.
- Managed, from $390/mo — we build it and then own it: monitoring, changes, compliance upkeep and a monthly report. Suits everyone else.
- Platform, from $2,400/mo — when this is one of several systems and you want them designed as one layer instead of five.
Platform usage is billed at cost on top and itemised on the invoice. There is no margin on it and no minimum spend.
Common questions
How long does Takeover Audit of Existing Automations take to build?
A few days to instrument what you already have, then it is continuous. The first monthly report lands at the end of the first full month.
What does it cost to run each month?
Two lines: our managed plan from from $390/mo, and platform usage billed at cost. Usage for this kind of system usually lands between $30 and $300 a month depending on volume. You see both itemised, and the platform account stays in your name.
Do we own it, or are we locked in?
You own it. The account, the numbers, the phone history and the source code are yours, and the foundation is open source. If you take it in-house, we hand over the repository and the runbook and that is the end of the conversation.
What if it breaks at 6pm on a Friday?
It is monitored. Failures raise an alert, the system degrades to something safe rather than silent, and hello@betr.agency is the inbox that answers. That is what the managed plan buys.
Can it work with the systems we already use?
Usually yes. Health checks on every flow, alert routing to a human, an incident log, and a monthly rollup of volume, delivery and failures. Where a system has no API, we look at whether an export, a shared inbox or a scheduled sync gets you 90 percent of the value for 10 percent of the cost.
Where to next
The product page for this build lists the specification, the timeline and what is included: Takeover Audit of Existing Automations. If you want to talk it through against your actual process, a scoping call is 30 minutes and costs nothing.