Retainers vs. care plans

It's easy to confuse a retainer with our Hosting Care or Business plans, because both are ongoing, monthly arrangements rather than one-off projects, but they cover genuinely different things, and mixing them up usually means paying for the wrong kind of capacity.

Hosting Care and Business plans keep an existing site running: hosting, SSL, backups, uptime monitoring, security updates, and a small allowance of minor changes each month (a text edit, a swapped image, a small content update). They're built around keeping a site stable and current, not around building anything new. If your site mostly just needs to keep working reliably, this is almost always the right (and cheaper) option.

A retainer, by contrast, is development capacity for actual building work: new features, integrations with other systems, meaningful changes to how something works, or ongoing product development on a platform that keeps evolving. It assumes the underlying site or product is already stable: a retainer isn't the right tool for keeping a neglected site online, and we'd flag that directly rather than selling development hours to a client who actually needs hosting and maintenance first.

The clearest way to tell which you need: if the question is "can you keep our site running and make small tweaks occasionally", that's Hosting Care or Business. If the question is "can you build this new thing, integrate with this other tool, or keep extending this product over time", that's a retainer. Many businesses end up with both: Hosting Care keeping the site stable, and a smaller retainer block for the steady trickle of bigger changes that a maintenance allowance wouldn't cover.

If you start a conversation with us about a retainer and it turns out what you actually need is day-to-day site care, we'll say so plainly and point you at Hosting Care or Business instead, because selling ongoing development capacity to a business that just needs its site kept online doesn't serve either of us well.