Why we don't do retainers
Retainers smooth agency revenue at clients' expense. Here's how we structure ongoing work without them — quarterly scoped engagements and pay-only-for-hours-used hourly support.
The question we get most often, after a quote goes out, is some version of: "What about ongoing work? Do you have a monthly retainer?" The answer is no, and the reason is not aesthetic.
What a retainer actually is
A retainer is a recurring invoice with no specified deliverable. The agency reserves capacity in exchange for a monthly payment, and the client gets "up to N hours" of work that may or may not exist. In practice, two things happen. Either the work isn't there and the client pays for capacity they don't use, or the work expands quietly to fill the hours, and the client pays for whatever fits inside the box. Both outcomes favor the agency.
Why agencies push them
Retainers smooth revenue. An agency with twenty retainers and no new business this month still has a predictable bank balance. That predictability is real, and we don't blame anyone for wanting it. But the cost of that predictability is structurally borne by clients who don't need monthly work — and the ones least likely to push back are the ones who feel locked in by the relationship.
The version we use instead
We bill per project, fixed price. When the project is done, the relationship pauses. If you need more work in a quarter, six months, or two years, you come back with a new scope and we write a new quote. Most clients do come back — because the work was good, not because their finance team forgot to cancel an auto-renewal.
The clients who don't come back are the ones for whom the project really was one-and-done. Our view is that those clients should not be paying us anything in month four. A retainer would have collected from them anyway.
The trade we accept
Without retainers, our revenue is lumpier and we have to win the work fresh each time. That is a real business cost, and we eat it. We'd rather have a smaller, leaner studio billing for actual work than a larger one billing for reserved capacity. If we ever need a retainer to make rent, the studio has bigger problems than its pricing model.
What we offer instead, when ongoing matters
For clients with genuine ongoing needs, we offer two specific things in place of retainers:
- Quarterly scoped engagements. A defined block of work, scoped and quoted up front, with a clear deliverable at the end. Same fixed-price model, just on a recurring rhythm. Renewable, not auto-renewing.
- Hourly support, billed only for hours used.A small per-hour rate for emergencies, questions, and small fixes — invoiced monthly, after the fact, against an actual log. Zero floor; if you don't use any hours, you don't pay anything.
Both options share the same property: the invoice corresponds to work that actually happened. That's the line we draw, and it's the reason no retainers shows up so often on the site. It's not a marketing distinction. It's a constraint we put on ourselves on purpose.