When we quote for proactive maintenance, clients sometimes balk at the monthly cost. Fair enough. But then they experience an emergency. The server that fails at 6pm on a Friday. The ransomware that encrypts everything. The breach that takes a week to contain. Suddenly, regular maintenance looks cheap.
Emergency work costs more per hour. Rushed solutions create technical debt. Recovery takes longer than prevention. And that's before counting the business disruption. I've never had a client experience a major incident and say "we should have spent less on prevention." Not once.
