Drupal capacity for agencies

• Availability: As of August 2026: available from September, 1–2 days a week
• Day rate: £450 a day, the same rate for every client
• Engagement: Day rate, fixed-scope SoW, or ongoing retainer
• Working style: Remote only — I'm not currently taking on regular on-site or office days
• Status: Limited company (Nathan Simmonds Digital Limited, No. 09514343)
• Insurance: £1m professional indemnity, £1m public liability
• Notice: No minimum engagement. Short notice to end an ongoing arrangement, agreed upfront

You've won the work, the timeline is fixed, and your Drupal people are already committed. I take a workstream — or a whole project — and deliver it inside your process.

What that looks like in practice:

• I work in your repository, to your branching model and coding standards, with whatever CI you already have. I don't ask you to change how you work.
• I attend the stand-ups and ceremonies that are useful and skip the ones that aren't. Tell me which is which.
• I estimate in whatever unit you estimate in, and I flag slippage early rather than at the end of a sprint.
• I can talk to your client directly if that helps, under your brand or my own — or stay entirely behind the scenes. Your call, agreed up front.

Typical work: module development, migrations, theme builds, integrations, performance work, upgrades, and picking up half-finished projects that need someone to work out what the last developer was doing.

Most agencies would rather build than maintain. Support work is unpredictable, hard to resource, and rarely profitable at agency rates — but clients still need it, and losing the relationship because you couldn't offer it is worse.

I take on the sites you've built and look after them: security updates, module and core upgrades, bug fixes, monitoring, backups, and the small development requests that arrive after launch. Under your brand, as part of your retainer, or directly with the client as a referral — whichever suits the relationship.

I also provide managed hosting, and this part is not resold. I design, build and manage the infrastructure myself, drawing on years of network engineering experience including high-availability hosting at ISP level. From single VPS setups to fully redundant, failover-capable environments.

The point of this arrangement is that your client stays your client. You keep the relationship and the build work; I handle the parts that don't fit your model.

Drupal, primarily:

• Site building, theme and module development, Composer-based builds, Drupal 7 through 11
• Migrations, including large Drupal 7 to modern Drupal projects — from single-page resource sites to a large, highly visible site holding thousands of scientific articles
• Views, Layout Builder, Context, Rules, multilingual configuration
• Headless and decoupled builds, exposing content via REST and JSON:API for JavaScript and mobile front ends
• Custom themes from the ground up, including Bootstrap and Radix bases
• Performance optimisation, scaling and refactoring
• Git, Composer, Docker, Drush and CI tooling appropriate to the project

And beyond Drupal: WordPress development and support to the same standard, and infrastructure work across AWS, Acquia, Pantheon and Cloudflare, with Varnish, Memcache and Redis where they earn their place.

I'm comfortable working with AI-assisted development tools where a project calls for it, and equally happy working without them — whichever fits how your team operates and what your client has agreed to.

Seven years at a top-20 UK digital agency, on projects for The Wildlife Trusts, Anthony Nolan, Parkinson's UK and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

Independently since then, for clients including RELX, the FTSE 100 publishing and analytics group, an international media brand, a AAA game studio, and Cohesion — a web experience start-up whose product was later acquired by Acquia. Some of that work came directly, some through other agencies.

I am a member of the Drupal Association — drupal.org/u/nathansimmonds.

References from agencies I have worked with are available on request.