The usual retainer is a block of hours bought in advance: ten hours a month at the hourly rate, perhaps with a small discount. It looks tidy, and it quietly turns you back into an hourly contractor who happens to be paid early.

What a retainer actually sells

Two things. The ongoing outcome — the thing that keeps working because you keep attending to it. And access — the right to reach you, which has a cost whether or not it is used.

Access is the part that gets priced at zero. Holding capacity for a client means declining other work to keep it available, and that is a real cost on the months when they use none of it.

The floor

Work out the capacity you are reserving and what that time is worth elsewhere. If you hold four days a month, the floor is four days at your rate, regardless of usage. Pricing below that means the quiet months subsidize the busy ones and the average is a loss.

The cap

An uncapped retainer degrades on a predictable schedule. Month one uses four days. By month eight it uses seven, the invoice has not moved, and the margin has gone. See scope creep.

Cap it explicitly and write down what is outside:

  • Hours or days included per month, stated.
  • What the retainer covers and what is a separate project.
  • How many people can request work, and who approves it.
  • Whether unused time rolls over. The straightforward answer is no, because the client is buying availability.

Pricing against value

The floor is where you start, not where you land. If the retainer protects $40,000 a month of revenue, the price should reflect that rather than the capacity it consumes. See value-based pricing.

A worked example

Keeping a morning a week clear for one client, answering their messages within a day, and staying current on their business costs you about $2,000 a month in time you cannot sell elsewhere. That is the floor.

On top of the floor goes the outcome. If the client's marketing spend is $50,000 a month and your oversight keeps even 10 percent of it from being wasted, the retainer protects $5,000 a month. A price of $4,000 sits between your floor and their value.

Then write down what is included: one strategy call, one written review, and replies within a working day. Anything beyond that is quoted separately. At the anniversary, look at a year of actual use and reset the price once.

Reviewing

Annually, on a set date, with a stated mechanism from the beginning. A retainer that has never been reviewed is one where the scope has grown and the price has not. See recurring revenue and projects to retainers.