How retainers work

A retainer is a standing arrangement for ongoing development work, rather than a one-off project with a fixed scope agreed up front. Instead of writing a new proposal every time something needs building, you have a known amount of capacity (ad hoc, or a fixed monthly block) that gets used on whatever matters most as priorities come up.

Each retainer month starts the same way: a short review of what's outstanding, what's come up since the last review, and what matters most right now. This isn't a formal meeting for its own sake; it's a quick alignment so time goes on the highest-value work first, rather than whatever happened to land in an inbox first. For ad hoc work, there's no fixed monthly review; instead, each piece of work is agreed as it comes up, billed for the hours it actually takes.

Throughout the month, time is logged against specific pieces of work, not tracked as a vague pool of hours. You can see what's been worked on and roughly how long it took, so there's never a mystery about where the time went. We keep this visible rather than treating it as an internal detail: a retainer is development capacity you're paying for, and you should be able to see exactly what that capacity bought.

At the end of each month (for the fixed monthly blocks), you get a plain-English summary: what was delivered, what's still in progress, and what's queued up next. If the month's allocated hours run out before everything on the list is done, that's flagged honestly rather than quietly carried over: any rollover or adjustment is something we agree with you directly, not something that happens by default behind the scenes.

If priorities shift partway through a month, which they often do, the plan simply adjusts; a retainer's whole point is flexibility to reprioritise without renegotiating a contract every time. What doesn't change without discussion is the tier itself: moving between ad hoc, a fixed monthly block, or the higher-capacity tier is straightforward, but we align changes to a billing period rather than switching mid-month.