Which sentence sounds like your week?
14 ways in, one question: which sentence sounds like your week? Find your row, read across. That’s the whole decision — no call required, no form in the way.
| Sounds like your week | Start with | Price | Back to you in |
|---|---|---|---|
| The site is down, or hacked, or the developer has vanished | Rescue Assessment | $2,500 | 5 business days |
| It works, but nobody is watching it and that has started to bother me | Sound Check or Standby | $150 – $350/mo | Same week |
| Someone sent me a quote and I cannot tell if it is fair | Second Opinion | $2,000 | 5 business days |
| We are on Drupal 10 and I keep hearing about December | Drupal 10 → 11 Readiness | $1,250 | 5 business days |
| We are on Drupal 7, 8 or 9 and it is getting hard to ignore | Upgrade Assessment | $3,500 | 10 business days |
| The store works but we are losing orders somewhere in checkout | Checkout Teardown | $3,000 | 10 business days |
| It is slow, and we have already done the obvious things | Performance Audit | $4,500 | 10 business days |
| I just want somebody senior to look at it and tell me straight | Site Health Check | $950 | 5 business days |
| We are building something new and do not know what to build it on | Build Roadmap | $3,500 – $7,500 | 2–3 weeks |
| Everyone is asking about AI and I cannot tell what is real | AI Integration Readiness | $3,500 | 10 business days |
| We bought Copilot seats and cannot tell if they are worth it | AI License & Spend Audit | $950 | 5 business days |
| Our AI pilot stalled and nobody can say why | Second Opinion | $2,000 | 5 business days |
| I need judgment more than I need hands | Fractional technical lead | From $4,500/mo | Next cycle |
| I run an agency and need senior hands under my brand | The bench | From $5,000 | One call |
None of those? Write me three sentences about what’s actually happening and I’ll tell you which row you’re in, or that you don’t need me at all. That part’s free and it’s staying free.
six clocks that are already running
Most of what gets sold on a page like this is optional. These six aren’t — they’ve got dates on them, somebody else already budgeted for them, and none of them care whether you’re ready. Here’s what’s coming, when, and where I’d start.
| What | When | What it means | Where to start |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drupal 10 loses security support | December 9, 2026 | No more coordinated security releases for 10.x. Roughly 157,000 sites still report running it, and the path to 11 is deprecation cleanup rather than a rebuild. | Drupal 10 → 11 Readiness — $1,250 |
| Drupal 7 end of life | Passed January 5, 2025 | No security team, no coordinated releases, and new contrib vulnerabilities still disclosed most months. Past end-of-life does not mean past saving — it means the order of operations matters. | Rescue Assessment — $2,500, or Upgrade Assessment — $3,500 |
| PCI DSS 4.x client-side requirements | Mandatory since March 31, 2025 | Requirement 6.4.3 wants a current inventory of every script on your payment pages; 11.6.1 wants tamper detection on them. Both are now assessed, not advisory. | Checkout Teardown — $3,000 |
| ADA Title II web accessibility | April 26, 2027, then April 26, 2028 | WCAG 2.1 AA for public entities — the earlier date for populations over 50,000, the later one below it. The European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since June 2025 if you sell into the EU. | Site Health Check — $950, or On Air’s regression checks |
| Power BI Premium P-SKU retirement | Non-EA capacities ended January 1, 2026; EA renewals off by January 1, 2028 | P-SKUs left the purchase flow on July 1, 2024 and the move to F-SKUs is manual — P1 to F64, P2 to F128, P3 to F256. Thirty days of grace, throttling from day 31, and every operation rejected on day 91. Worth checking what you are actually on before you buy capacity you may not need. | Reporting Readiness Check — $1,450 |
| EU AI Act Article 50 transparency | Enforceable since August 2, 2026; marking grace closes December 2, 2026 | If a person is talking to a machine, say so; if a machine wrote it, mark it so another machine can tell. This bites only when your output is used in the EU. What is NOT a 2026 clock is the high-risk regime everybody sells urgency on — Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 moved Annex III to December 2, 2027 and Annex I to August 2, 2028. I flag exposure at intake; your counsel rules on it. | AI Integration Readiness — $3,500 |
Every number on this site, in one table
I went looking in August 2026. Of eighteen shops that sell Drupal support and maintenance, five publish a price. The rest have a contact form. This is the price list.
Dead North price list — current August 19, 2026, held through February 28, 2027
Keep it running$150 – $1,850/momonthly · no contract · cancel anytime5 lines
| Offering | Price | What lands | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air Time — Sound Check | $150/mo | None — nobody fixes anything | Terms
|
| Air Time — Standby | $350/mo | Small fixes under 30 minutes, up to four a month | Terms
|
| Air Time — On Air | $850/mo | Three hours a month | Terms
|
| Air Time — Prime Time | $1,850/mo | Six hours a month | Terms
|
| Each additional production site on Prime Time | $450/mo | The same watch and the same patch window on the second store | Terms
|
Find out what's wrong$950 – $7,500fixed fee · written findings · the fee credits toward the work14 lines
| Offering | Price | What lands | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site Health Check | $950 flat | A prioritized fix list with quick wins separated from structural work, plus a 30-minute walkthrough | Terms
|
| AI License & Spend Audit | $950 flat | A cancel, downgrade or reassign list with the annual dollar figure and the renewal date it has to happen by | Terms
|
| Drupal 10 → 11 Readiness | $1,250 flat | A go/no-go and a fixed-price upgrade quote good for 60 days — one costed page for whoever signs the cheque | Terms
|
| Reporting Readiness Check | $1,450 flat | A go/no-go on Power BI with the alternative named if it is not, and a fixed-price quote good for 60 days | Terms
|
| Second Opinion | $2,000 flat | A written memo: what is missing, what is padded, and the three questions to ask before you sign | Terms
|
| Rescue Assessment | $2,500 flat · $3,500 for Drupal 7, multisite, or heavy custom code | What you actually have, what is urgent, and what stable costs | Terms
|
| Checkout Teardown | $3,000 flat | Findings ranked by how fast you can stop the leak, and a tamper-detection review for 11.6.1 | Terms
|
| Upgrade Assessment | $3,500 flat | A costed roadmap with a real migration number and the custom-code risk called honestly | Terms
|
| AI Integration Readiness | $3,500 flat | A system-of-record map, a written permission model, three scored workflows, and a seed eval set with verified answers | Terms
|
| Performance Audit | $4,500 flat | Prioritized written findings with an estimated cost per fix, and an hour walking through them | Terms
|
| Tableau → Power BI Assessment | $4,500 flat | A per-workbook fixed quote good for 60 days and a sequencing plan | Terms
|
| AI Test Pattern | $7,500 flat | A measured accuracy number on your own data, a cost per run, and a recommendation that may be “do not build this” | Terms
|
| Build Roadmap | $3,500 – $7,500 | A roadmap that is yours to take to any builder, including not me | Terms
|
| Upgrade Assessment — an estate, up to five sites | $7,500 · $1,200 per site beyond five | A sequencing plan you can hand a budget owner | Terms
|
Build something$15,000+ · small-band from $1,500fixed scope · written down before it starts3 lines
| Offering | Price | What lands | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom build — platforms, stores, apps | From $15,000 | A scoped build shipped in increments you can watch land | Terms
|
| Small-band site partnership — portfolio launch | $1,500 launch · normally $6,000 | Home, shows, music, and press — responsive, launched, and handed over | Terms
|
| Small-band template site — coming soon | $750 launch · $10/mo hosting | One of 5 prebuilt band sites, populated with the band’s supplied words, photos, and links | Terms
|
Borrow the lead$4,500 – $8,500/momonthly · judgment rather than hands5 lines
| Offering | Price | What lands | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fractional lead — Advisory | $4,500/mo | Direction, review, and a decision log that stays yours | Terms
|
| Fractional lead — Advisory — AI & data | $6,500/mo | Direction, review, and a decision log that stays yours | Terms
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| Fractional lead — Embedded | $8,500/mo | Direction, review, and a decision log that stays yours | Terms
|
| Regulated estates — HHS 504, ADA Title II, PCI-bound checkout | +25% | The documentation and evidence trail that work actually needs | Terms
|
| Agency bench — senior hands under your brand | From $5,000 | Work your PMs can forward without translating | Terms
|
Point AI at it$1,250/mo · builds from $15,000published prices · honest limits · nobody else prints these10 lines
| Offering | Price | What lands | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sorting and Routing on One Pipeline You Already Run | $15,000 fixed · $7,500 if the rules clear the week-two gate | Orders, RMAs, warranty claims, supplier and AP email, inbound leads that must land on a CRM record | Terms
|
| Second workflow on the same rails — same source system, same review queue, same auth | +$7,500 | On top of Sorting and Routing on One Pipeline You Already Run | Terms
|
| Documents Into Your System of Record | $18,500 fixed | Packing slips, dealer and wholesale order forms, supplier spec sheets, remittance advice, bills of lading, warranty cards | Terms
|
| Additional document type — same destination, same source family, ≤20 fields, ≤4 pages | +$7,500 | On top of Documents Into Your System of Record | Terms
|
| Second destination system — a second auth model, schema, idempotency contract and audit trail | +$6,500 – $9,500 | On top of Documents Into Your System of Record | Terms
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| Catalog Search That Knows Your Stock, Your Prices and Your Part Numbers | $15,000 for the first two, then $22,500 | One store, one catalog source, up to about 25,000 SKUs, English, hybrid BM25 + vector retrieval fused with RRF | Terms
|
| AI build — anything that has to be designed | $25,000 – $75,000 | A build priced off a measured pilot, with the accuracy, safe-failure and cost-per-run numbers agreed in writing before any model work starts | Terms
|
| Clear to Air — a stalled pilot into production | $14,500 – $26,000 | An Acceptance Set built from real cases, guardrails, cost caps with alerting, the permission model, observability, rollback and a runbook | Terms
|
| Confidence Monitor — per production AI system | $1,250/mo · $750/mo each additional system | The Acceptance Set re-run weekly whether it is green or red, model-deprecation watch, and token spend metered against a hard cap | Terms
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| Confidence Monitor+ — per production AI system | $3,250/mo | Everything in Confidence Monitor, plus prompt and retrieval iteration, model migrations executed rather than only planned, and a four-hour response on a red alert | Terms
|
AI didn’t get its own price list. It got the same one.
Everything new folds into the five ways of buying already on this page: the fixed-price answers, the builds, the fractional lead, the monthly plans, and the one hourly rate. There’s no AI surcharge anywhere on this site, and there never was going to be. The premium in this market lives in fixed scope, not in a rate card — so what you get for the AI work is the same arithmetic as everything else, printed the same way.
The table above does carry a group of its own for the things that had nowhere sensible to sit — a $1,250/mo monitor on a production AI system is not an Air Time rung. That’s a shelf, not a surcharge.
The rules behind these numbers — credits, the price lock, the hourly
The credit rules, once: a diagnostic fee comes off whatever you buy next — thirty days on the diagnostics, sixty on the two roadmaps, because a build or a migration has to clear a budget cycle first. One credit per client, and it doesn’t stack with the Founding Five discount: whichever saves you more, not both. This list is current as of August 19, 2026 and holds through February 28, 2027 — start a retainer before then and that rate is locked for twelve months. Anything hourly, including work past your included hours, is $250; the whole story is one channel down.
Two things about that last band. What is in this table is what you can buy today, which is why the analytics ladder is not in it — those prices are real and published, but the work is not open until the proof behind it lands, and a price list is a poor place to put something nobody can order. It is published in full, marked as not sold, one page over. And there’s no AI hourly — it’s the same $250, for the same reason the rest of this page gives one number and sticks to it. The long version of both channels has its own room: AI & data and the analytics ladder.
The two numbers most shops won’t print
Anything hourly
$250/hrEverything here is priced, and where the work is hourly it’s $250. That’s above what most Drupal shops list and below what an agency costs you all in, because there’s no junior backfill and no bench to carry. If you’d rather have the cheaper hour, it lives inside a plan.
Billed in fifteen-minute increments, with a written estimate before anything longer than an hour. Work past your included hours bills at the same $250 — list rate, not a penalty. So does after-hours work: no premium, no midnight surcharge, and no promise anybody’s awake. A higher after-hours rate is really an offer to work after hours, and I’d rather close the price hole than sell a night shift one person can’t staff.
No plan in place
$500/hrIf we’ve never worked together and something’s on fire, I’ll help if I’ve got room: $500 an hour with a 2-hour minimum, scheduled only when there’s genuinely space.
This is a door that’s mostly closed, and the price is what closes it. I often won’t have room — dropping a client’s week to take a stranger’s emergency isn’t something I’ll do quietly. A plan is how you get a slot, and it’s cheaper.
The questions you’d have to book a call to ask
What does website maintenance cost in Minneapolis?
At Dead North, $150 to $1,850 a month, published above. The market around here runs from $59-a-month scripts to institutional Drupal care near $16,000 a year — the difference is what is actually inside: staging-tested patches, backups somebody has restored, and a senior engineer who already knows your site.
Do you take over sites another agency built?
Yes — that is the rescue practice, and it is most of what lands here. A $2,500 flat assessment tells you what you actually have, whoever built it and however long ago. It is $3,500 if you are on Drupal 7, running multisite, or carrying more custom code than one person writes in a year, and a free fifteen-minute scan settles which one you are before you pay. No judgment about the state of it.
What does a Drupal upgrade cost?
The readiness read on a Drupal 10 site is $1,250. A full assessment of a Drupal 7, 8 or 9 site is $3,500, and an estate of up to five sites is $7,500 plus $1,200 for each site after that. Each one comes back as a module-by-module roadmap with a real number for the migration itself, and the fee credits toward the work.
What is the cheapest way to hire Dead North?
$150 a month for Sound Check — the machine watching your site and telling you the truth about it every month. The cheapest fixed answer from a person is the $950 Site Health Check: a prioritized fix list in 5 business days, and the fee comes off whatever you buy next within thirty days.
What is the Founding Five program?
Five charter seats at 20% off a first engagement, in exchange for proof I can point at: a written case study with real numbers, or a named reference call if your legal team would rather. The discount rides the invoice as its own labeled line, so list prices never move, and the charter closes at five clients or December 31, 2026, whichever comes first. Founding Five or a diagnostic credit, whichever saves you more — not both.
How fast do you respond?
Site down, checkout broken, or a live security incident: 1 hour on Prime Time, 2 business hours on On Air, 4 business hours on Standby. Broken but still standing is 4 business hours on every tier, and a question or a small change comes back inside 1 business day. Business hours are 8 to 5 Central, Monday through Friday, and a new-project email gets a real answer from Dane inside one business day.
What is your hourly rate?
$250 an hour, and it is the same number whether you are on a plan or not. Billed in fifteen-minute blocks, with a written estimate before I start anything longer than an hour — there has never been a surprise invoice here and there is not going to be one. Plans are not a discount on hours. They are reserved time, monitoring that runs whether you call or not, and a patch window, with some hours folded in so a broken form does not need a purchase order.
What happens past my included hours?
The same $250 an hour — list rate, not a penalty and not a discount, and you see the number in writing before the work starts. The cap is a floor on what is included, not a trapdoor. If you find yourself past it most months, that is a conversation about the next tier up, and I will be the one to start it.
What is the smallest project you take?
Fixed-scope custom builds start at $15,000. The named exception is the small-band site partnership: a repeatable four-page site for a qualifying independent small band, offered at $1,500 as Dead North’s standing give-back program. It is not a discounted custom build. For everyone else below the floor, the honest answer is usually a diagnostic or hours inside an Air Time plan.
What if something breaks at 2am?
You get me if I am awake and best effort if I am not. One person, one pager, and a real preference for sleeping — which is why there is no 24/7 claim anywhere on this page. What there is: an after-hours protocol in writing, and after-hours work at the same $250 as everything else. No midnight surcharge, and no promise anyone is up. The patching and the monitoring exist so that 2am does not happen.
Who you’re actually hiring
About the “we”: Dead North is a small senior studio, and Dane Petersen leads it. Every engagement is senior-led — trusted specialists come in when the work calls for more hands, and you’re told who they are. You always know who’s doing your work, because you’re talking to the lead.
Founding Five · charter seats · 5 of 5 open
Closes December 31, 2026 — filled or not
Dead North is a new marquee over thirteen years of work. The migrations, the fleet tooling, the rescues all happened — they just happened under other banners. Five charter seats put that record under this flag.
20% off a first engagement — any diagnostic, any project, or the first three months of any Air Time tier — in exchange for proof I can point at: a written case study with real numbers, or a named reference call if your legal team would rather. Either one works. I’d rather have a phone number that answers than a paragraph nobody signed off on.
Founding Five or a diagnostic credit, whichever saves you more — not both. The discount rides the invoice as its own labeled line, so the list prices on this page never move. At most 2 of the five seats go to retainers, because a discounted seat that never ends isn’t a charter, it’s a hole in the roster.
Rescue Assessment $2,500 → $2,000 · Standby $350 → $280/mo for the first quarter