Most web agencies sell trades businesses a "monthly retainer" of $300 to $1,500. What you actually get in exchange varies wildly. Often, very little.

We don't do that. Here's why, and why we think most agencies do.

What a retainer actually is

A retainer is a fixed monthly payment in exchange for ongoing services. In theory: the agency does maintenance, content updates, SEO work, design tweaks, hosting, monitoring, all month long.

In practice for most retainers: you pay $500 a month. The agency does roughly $50 worth of actual work (one email exchange, one tweak to a page, one "SEO report" auto-generated by software). The other $450 is profit margin disguised as ongoing service.

Most retainers exist because they're profitable for the agency, not because they're necessary for the customer. The agency gets predictable monthly revenue. The customer gets the comfort of "someone is handling it" without ever quite knowing what's being handled.

Why we don't do them

Three reasons:

One: retainers tempt agencies to be slow. If you're a customer on a $500/month retainer and you submit a request for a small content update, the agency has zero incentive to deliver it fast. Slower is more profitable. Faster means you might cancel because you noticed how little work the retainer actually represents.

Two: retainers make pricing dishonest. If we sell you a $2,400 site plus a $300/month retainer, the real cost of the site over 5 years is $20,400. We'd rather price the site at what it actually costs to build and bill the maintenance separately, so you can see the numbers without dressing.

Three: the work that needs ongoing money is small, and we'd rather sell only what's real. Hosting and the occasional content change. That's it. We charge $30/month for that, posted publicly, no surprise upsells. If you need a major change later (a new section, a redesign of a page, a custom feature), we quote it as a separate fixed-price project at the time. No standing meter.

What we charge for instead

The build: fixed price, written quote, paid 50% upfront and 50% at launch. Done in 2 weeks.
Hosting + small updates: $30/month. This covers running the site, SSL renewals, content changes (new prices, new services, holiday hours, new photos), and minor tweaks. Same-day turnaround on hosting clients during business hours.
Bigger changes: quoted separately. A new section is a few hundred dollars. A redesign of a page is more. Always written, always fixed, always before work starts.

If you don't want our hosting, you can take the site to any host. No lock-in. You'd save the $30/month and lose the same-day update service. We're fine with that.

The catch (because there's always one)

Saying this out loud changes how we have to operate. If we charged retainers, we could afford to be sloppy on the build, because the customer keeps paying regardless. Since we don't have that backstop, the build has to be right the first time. Otherwise we lose the customer and they tell their friends.

That's actually the point. Pricing without ongoing monthly extraction forces us to deliver work that earns the customer's loyalty on the merits, not through inertia.

Most agencies couldn't do this if they tried. Their cost structure (account managers, sales teams, fancy offices) requires the retainer income to survive. We're a two-person operation with no overhead. We can price differently because we live differently.

Worth noting

This isn't a hot take that agencies are evil. Most agencies offering retainers genuinely believe they're providing ongoing value. Some are. The good ones run retainers as "fractional CMO" or "fractional design partner" arrangements where the customer is actually getting strategy and ongoing creative work, not just hosting with a mark-up.

Our point is narrower: for a trades business, ongoing $500/month retainers from web agencies are usually a bad trade. Buy the site you need, host it cheaply, change it when you need to.

If that pitch works for you, our pricing is posted. If you want to talk about whether what we offer fits what your business needs, get in touch. Twenty minutes on the phone and you'll know.

All posts tagged“agency”

Why we don't charge monthly retainers

All posts tagged
“agency”