Custom builds
The software between off-the-shelf and overkill: platforms, portals, member sites, integrations. Scoped in writing, shipped in increments you can see working.
- Drupal
- WordPress
- React
- Astro
Ecommerce
Carts, subscriptions, checkout flows — and the unglamorous parts where stores actually fail: tax, shipping, the ERP feed, the promotion stack, the abandoned-order edge cases.
- Drupal Commerce
- WooCommerce
- Headless
Companion apps
App-store apps as an extension of your platform, sharing a brain with your website — content lives once, ships everywhere. Sold with the platform, not as a standalone app shop.
- React Native
- Expo
AI integration
The useful kind: search that understands your catalog, drafts that start from your data, support that has read your docs. If a cron job would do it better, we'll say so.
- Claude
- RAG
- Automation
Insurance, from someone who reads the code
Plenty of plans promise updates. This one is a senior engineer who already knows your site, with the numbers printed where you can compare them.
Standby
$350/mo
For the site that has to stay standing
- Security advisories patched within 72 hours, staging-tested first
- Daily backups — test-restored quarterly, because an unrestored backup is a rumor
- Uptime and error monitoring with a human on the alert
- A monthly note in plain language: what changed, what’s watched
- One capped hour of small fixes folded in
On Air
$650/mo
For the site the organization runs on
- Everything in Standby, patches within 48 hours
- Core Web Vitals monitoring — speed regressions caught before users feel them
- Accessibility regression checks on every update cycle
- Deprecated-API and module-health watch, so upgrades never ambush you
- Three capped hours of small fixes and content help
Prime Time
from $1,200/mo
For the store where downtime is lost revenue
- Everything in On Air, patches within 24 hours
- Checkout and cart monitoring — the flow that makes money, watched like it
- Promotion-stack and transactional-email sanity checks
- Priority response: business-hours emergencies answered inside the hour
- Six capped hours of fixes, tuning, and merchandising help
The honest SLA
Business-hours response inside four hours, emergencies faster, and a written after-hours protocol. No fake 24/7 — there's no offshore NOC pretending to be me at 3 a.m., which is exactly why the patching and monitoring are built to make 3 a.m. not happen.
What it isn't
Not a redesign subscription, not unlimited dev hours, not content writing. Work beyond your tier's cap gets a plain quote before it happens — never a surprise on an invoice. The roster is capped on purpose: when it's full, it's full.
Buy an answer before you buy a project
Performance Audit
$3,500 flatA forensic read of a slow site — Drupal, WordPress, or whatever it turns out to be: render pipeline, cache strategy, edge config, Core Web Vitals. Delivered as a written, prioritized fix list in plain language; the fee credits toward remediation.
Checkout Teardown
$2,000 flatYour store’s cart, checkout, promotion stack, and transactional email, torn down finding by finding. Where the money leaks, ranked by how fast you can stop it.
Upgrade Assessment
from $2,500An aging Drupal estate — 7 through 10 — assessed module by module, with a costed roadmap to Drupal 11 and honest risk calls. The fee credits toward the migration.
Rescue Assessment
$1,500 flatWe support sites we didn’t build — whoever built them. The assessment tells you what you actually have, what’s urgent, and what it costs to make it boring again.
Drupal
Versions 5 through 11, since 2013: commerce, multisite, and migrations at scale — a monolithic Drupal 7 with millions of nodes rebuilt as Drupal 10 without losing a record. Two contrib modules maintained on drupal.org.
WordPress & CMS
WordPress builds and rescues, WooCommerce included — plus headless Strapi when the CMS should be an API and get out of the way.
Cloud & DevOps
AWS — certified Solutions Architect (Associate) and Cloud Practitioner — and Azure: cloud-native migrations off monolithic legacy, Docker and DDEV environments, CI/CD pipelines, microservices where they earn their complexity.
Languages
PHP and Symfony, Node.js, C#/.NET, JavaScript and TypeScript (React, Astro, Next), Python. The right tool, not the favorite tool.
Mobile
Native Java/Android and iOS, Flutter, Xamarin, React Native — including GPS and location-based apps shipped to app stores. Companion apps to a platform, or standalone when standalone is honest.
AI & agents
LLM integration and multi-agent developer tooling: autonomous agents that audit, diagnose, and repair production systems. V.I.N.CENT is the proof running in production.
Interactive 3D
Three.js and HTML5 Canvas — browser-native interactive work up to and including a playable game built from original design. The wordmark on this site’s homepage is the small demo.
Infrastructure
Cloudflare and Pantheon, named and visible: managed hosting includes edge protection and caching as a line item, not a mystery. This site runs on the same stack we sell.
And whatever isn't on the list: bring it anyway. The first deliverable is honest advice, including when the honest advice is that you don't need me.
Fractional lead
from $3,500/mo
Senior technical direction on a monthly cadence: architecture, code review, vendor oversight, hiring help. Leadership, not dev-hours.
Project
scoped in writing
A defined build with a written scope, a number, and a date. Changes are conversations, not surprises on an invoice.
Program
from $350/mo
Peace of Mind, monthly. The relationship where we already know your site before something breaks.
White-label Drupal, under your name
Your shop is great at what it does — and sometimes a client walks in with a Drupal estate anyway. Overflow capacity, rescues, upgrades, and maintenance, delivered under your brand on a reserved-capacity monthly retainer.
NDA-friendly, your ticketing system or ours, deliverables carry your logo. Your client never needs to know Dead North exists — that's the product.
The shape
- Reserved monthly capacity, so your emergencies are never queued behind ours
- Senior-level work: architecture, upgrades, Commerce, the modules nobody wants
- Written findings and handoffs your PMs can forward without translating
- Rates and terms by conversation — this page stays quiet on purpose
About the “we”: Dead North is Dane Petersen's practice. Dane leads every engagement personally, and pulls in trusted specialists when the work calls for more hands than two. You always know who is doing your work, because you're talking to him.
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