Reflex for Startups — Ship product, not infrastructure fires

TL;DR

Early-stage startups need to ship product, not babysit infrastructure. Reflex acts as your on-call DevOps engineer — automated server monitoring, self-healing repair playbooks, and a deployment pipeline — so your engineering team stays focused on features, not firefighting.

The problem

• You cannot afford a DevOps hire — a senior DevOps engineer costs £70–100k/year in the UK. At seed or Series A, that salary buys two product engineers instead. But production servers still need someone watching them.
• Your CTO is the ops team — the technical co-founder handles deploys, monitors Slack for alerts, SSHes into production to restart workers, and then tries to get back to the feature they were building. Context-switching between product work and ops work is destroying velocity.
• Infrastructure incidents delay launches — a server outage the day before a launch, a failed migration during a demo, a queue worker crash during investor due diligence. Each incident costs more than downtime — it costs confidence.
• No audit trail makes due diligence painful — investors and enterprise customers ask "what is your ops process?" and the honest answer is "we SSH in and fix things." There is no log of who deployed what, when incidents occurred, or how they were resolved.
• Scaling means starting over — the bash scripts and manual processes that work at 1 server fall apart at 5. Most startups hit an infrastructure crisis exactly when they should be focused on growth.

How Reflex helps

• Brain is your on-call engineer — Reflex Brain monitors CPU, memory, disk, and process health around the clock. When something breaks, it triggers the appropriate repair playbook automatically. Your CTO stops being the pager and starts being the product leader.
• Deployment pipeline from day one — Pipeline connects to your Git repository and deploys with health gates and automatic rollback. No more "git pull on production" and hoping for the best. Safe deploys become the default, not the aspiration.
• Audit trail investors trust — every deploy, incident, and repair is logged with timestamps, actors, and outcomes. When an investor asks about your ops maturity, you show them the Reflex timeline. It demonstrates process without the headcount.
• Grow without tier migrations — start with one production server. When you add staging, workers, and engineers, connect more hosts at the same per-server rate. Pipeline and team seats are included.
• Playbooks encode institutional knowledge — the "how to fix the queue worker" runbook that lives in your CTO's head becomes a Reflex playbook that runs automatically. When you eventually hire a DevOps engineer, the playbooks are the documentation.

Recommended plan

Start with one production server at £29/server/month while you are pre-product-market fit. When you add staging, workers, and redundancy, connect more hosts — Pipeline and team seats are already included.

Getting started

1. Install reflexd on your production and staging servers — two servers, ten minutes. Brain starts monitoring immediately with sensible defaults.
2. Connect your repository and ship your next deploy via Pipeline — replace your manual deploy process on the first day. Health gates and rollback are enabled by default.
3. Enable repair playbooks for your stack — select the playbooks that match your technology (PHP-FPM, Node.js, Python, queue workers) and Brain handles the rest.