Offer a monthly maintenance retainer to every client after project completion. Include: weekly webhook delivery monitoring, settlement delay alerts, API deprecation notice review, on-call response (within 4 hours on business days), and monthly payment health report. Price: KES 10,000–30,000/month for small clients, KES 30,000–80,000/month for high-volume merchants. Convert 30-50% of project clients to retainers.
| Service | Frequency | How |
|---|---|---|
| Webhook delivery monitoring | Weekly | Check Paystack dashboard → Logs; alert if failure rate > 1% |
| Settlement monitoring | Per settlement cycle | Flag if settlement is > T+3 business days late |
| API deprecation review | Monthly | Check Paystack changelog, test deprecated endpoints |
| Incident response | On-demand (SLA: 4 hours) | Investigate and fix payment failures, escalate to Paystack support |
| Monthly payment health report | Monthly | Email summary: transaction volume, success rate, failed payments, webhook health |
| Minor updates | As needed | Up to 2 hours/month of code changes included |
Set up monitoring for each retainer client:
// Simple webhook health check script (run as cron job)
async function checkWebhookHealth(paystackSecretKey) {
// Fetch recent transaction list and check webhook delivery
var res = await fetch('https://api.paystack.co/transaction?perPage=50', {
headers: { Authorization: 'Bearer ' + paystackSecretKey },
});
var data = await res.json();
var recent = data.data;
// Check success rate in last 50 transactions
var successCount = recent.filter(t => t.status === 'success').length;
var failRate = ((recent.length - successCount) / recent.length) * 100;
if (failRate > 10) {
// Alert: over 10% of recent transactions failed
await sendAlert('High failure rate: ' + failRate.toFixed(1) + '%');
}
return { total: recent.length, success: successCount, failRate };
}For webhook delivery specifically, check Paystack dashboard → Settings → Webhooks → View Logs. Paystack shows delivery attempts and response codes. If you see a pattern of 4xx or 5xx responses, the client's webhook handler has a problem.
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See handing over a payment integration for how to start the retainer conversation at project end.
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