What Bot Maintenance Looks Like at TrueFocus
Before a title company signs an automation agreement, one question almost always comes up: what happens when the bot breaks?
It is a fair question, but it usually points at the wrong worry. Well-built automation is managed continuously, so the more useful thing to understand is what ongoing maintenance covers and how we are set up to deliver it.
At TrueFocus Automation, bot maintenance on a custom build runs at roughly $500 per month per bot, and it covers far more than emergency fixes. Our proprietary tools like Title Hunter® and Title Miner® work differently, since those are billed per transaction and we absorb any changes on our side. Here is what the maintenance on a custom bot includes.
Weekly Maintenance: Keeping the Environment Stable
Every Monday, our team runs a structured maintenance cycle. Bots are stopped, caches are cleared, server utilities are run, and the environment restarts clean before the week’s processing begins. This is scheduled, preventive work that keeps each bot running the way it was built to run.
County websites update, client systems change, and the bot-detection tools on various sites get more aggressive over time. None of that becomes an emergency when you are already watching for it. The weekly cycle is where drift gets caught before it turns into a failure.
Daily Monitoring: Catching Problems Before the Client Does
Beyond the weekly reset, our team monitors active bots every day. For many processes, we consolidate the output into a daily report sent straight to the client, showing volume processed, exceptions flagged, and anything that needs manual review.
This matters for two reasons. It surfaces optimization opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it keeps clients informed without making them babysit the system.
When something does go wrong, say a county site changes its layout or a client upgrades their production system, we document it and scope it as a change request. We estimate the time required, walk the client through the details, and address it.
Why Documentation Makes a Bot More Recoverable
Here’s what surprises most title companies: a well-documented bot is often more recoverable than a human-run process.
When a key employee leaves, the institutional knowledge tends to leave with them. The next person gets trained from scratch, and in the gap the work either slows down or someone fills in with partial knowledge.
Every custom automation bot we build is delivered with a step-by-step process definition document, or PDD. If a bot stops running, the PDD shows your team exactly what it was doing and in what order, and bot activity logs are also available for deeper insight. Your team runs the process manually, which can vary anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, until the fix is in place.
You can use our ROI calculator to factor maintenance into your total cost of ownership before committing to a project.
A bot rarely fails quietly or without a paper trail. Between scheduled upkeep, daily eyes on the output, and documentation your team can pick up, the system is built to keep moving even on its worst day.
Jimmy Lewis is the co-founder of TrueFocus Automation, a specialist in RPA and AI-driven workflow automation for the title insurance, mortgage, and real estate industries. TrueFocus has developed 840+ automation bots supporting more than 2,500 workflows and has returned over 1.3 million production hours to clients.
