AEM Support on Demand
DevHandler Adobe Silver Solution Partner · AEM Sites, EMEA Book 20 minutes

AEM Support on Demand

You are not paying for AEM developers. You are paying for the gaps between the work.

AEM work arrives in waves — a release, an incident, a service pack, an upgrade somebody scheduled for you. Headcount does not arrive in waves. It arrives every month, at the same price.

Billed by the hourOnly the hours we actually work. No monthly minimum.
€50 an hourOne rate, senior engineers, published. No tiers, no games.
An architect behind itAnd the rest of the team when it turns into a real project.
10+ years on AdobeNineteen AEM programmes. Clutch 5.0.

The three options you have today

All three make you pay for the quiet months

There is nothing wrong with any of them when the roadmap is full. The problem is that AEM roadmaps are almost never full twelve months a year.

Option 1 · In-house team

You keep the knowledge, which matters more in AEM than in most stacks. You also pay the salary in every quiet month — and senior AEM people are scarce enough that letting one go is close to irreversible.

12 months paid for 6 months of work

Option 2 · Full-time contractors

Faster to start and easier to stop. The arithmetic is identical while they are engaged: the invoice is the same in a heavy month and a dead one. And when they go, the context goes with them.

Same invoice, none of the retention

Option 3 · Partner retainer

Capacity on call, which is the right idea. Then a monthly minimum whether the work shows up or not, and unused hours that quietly expire at the end of the period.

You buy the hours before you know you need them

Calculator

What does your idle AEM capacity cost?

Three numbers. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored — the maths runs in your browser. All figures in euro, because that is what we bill in.

In-house salaries, or contractors on an hourly rate.

Developers and architects who work on AEM, not the whole digital team.

Gross salary plus employer cost, tooling and management overhead — what the person actually costs the company.

Be honest here — count the tickets, releases and incidents that actually happen, not the capacity you hold.

You pay this for capacity nobody used
$281,000
per year
worked idle
Your AEM capacity5,760 h/yr
Hours you actually use1,440 h/yr
What you spend today$420,000
The same hours with us$72,000
Difference$348,000
Below 603 hours a month, buying the hours beats holding the capacity.

What the hours are spent on

Four things, and every hour is logged against one

01

Development

Components, templates, workflows, integrations, Content Fragments, Edge Delivery blocks. Written upgrade-safe: no deprecated APIs, no /libs overlays, nothing that breaks on Adobe's release cycle.

02

Cloud Manager & releases

Pipelines, environments, failed deployments, quality gates that will not go green, content copies between environments, and the release nobody wants to run on a Friday.

03

Troubleshooting

Production incidents, dispatcher and cache behaviour, Oak indexing, memory and query problems, replication that stopped, authoring that got slow after the last content load.

04

Optimization

Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse budgets, index and query tuning, asset pipelines, licence and environment cost, and an upgrade-readiness read before you commit to a date.

How it runs

Three steps, and the first one is free

A 60-minute call on your stack

Version, hosting model, what is custom, what hurts. You leave with our read of it in writing whether or not you buy anything. Most people find that part useful on its own.

A named architect and a way in

One senior who learns your codebase and stays your contact. Work comes in through your tracker or ours, whichever you prefer. We reply within one business day; a production incident starts the same day.

Hours logged, visible, invoiced monthly

Every hour tied to a ticket, and the log is yours to read at any time. No minimum, no subscription to cancel. A quiet month is a small invoice.

Rate

One number, and it does not move

€50/hour

Senior AEM engineers. No retainer, no monthly minimum, no prepaid block to buy, nothing to cancel. A quiet month is a small invoice, and a month with no work is no invoice at all.

A larger, scoped project — a 6.5 migration, an Edge Delivery build, a replatforming — is quoted as a fixed price instead, with the delivery risk on us. Hourly is for the work that cannot be scoped in advance.

Where this does not work

Three cases where we are the wrong answer

You genuinely have full-time AEM work. If the calculator puts you above the break-even line month after month, a team of your own is cheaper and better. We will say that on the call rather than after the first invoice.

You need someone in the room. On-site presence, a security clearance, or a contract that requires a local legal entity — that is not us, and pretending otherwise wastes a quarter of your time and ours.

You want the cheapest hour on the market. There are offshore rates well below ours. They are real. What they do not include is a working day that overlaps yours and an architect who has done this migration before.

Who you would be working with

DevHandler — AEM, and nothing else

An Adobe Silver Solution Partner working exclusively on Adobe Experience Cloud. Nineteen AEM programmes delivered in automotive, media, retail, travel, financial services, healthcare and manufacturing — most of them behind another agency's brand.

Adobe Silver Solution Partner AEM Sites specialization, EMEA 8 Adobe certifications Clutch 5.0 Four localization connectors in production EU-based, overlapping US East Coast hours