Also: monthly retainer, ongoing engagement, retained work
A retainer is a recurring fee that holds a supplier's time or availability open across a period, so what the client buys is first call on somebody's attention rather than any named artefact.
Assessment. A retained fee that can be entirely used up by scheduled work is not a retainer, only a standing order for days at a discount. The arrangement earns its keep when somebody is buying the right to interrupt you, and deserves refusing when it only locks a lower price onto work that would have been commissioned anyway.
What the recurring fee is compensating
Three separate things are being bought, and most disputes come from the parties valuing different ones. The first is refusal: to stay reachable for one client you turn other work down, and that cost lands in the quiet months as surely as the busy ones. The second is interruptibility, which is expensive in a way clients rarely see. An engagement you can be pulled off at short notice cannot also be the deep, uninterrupted work you do best, so the fee prices the shallower version of your week rather than the hours themselves. The third is accumulated knowledge of their situation: the reason a retained supplier answers on the spot what a freshly hired one would need a fortnight to work out. That knowledge is the part with real value to the buyer, and the part no marketplace can sell them, because it does not survive being explained to somebody new every quarter.
Which means the fee should be justified out loud, in those terms, at the point of proposing it. Freelancers who present a retainer as a bundle of hours invite the obvious response, which is a count of the hours used, and lose that argument in any month where the client happened to be busy elsewhere. Freelancers who present it as reserved attention with a defined boundary get asked instead what falls outside, which is the conversation you want. Pick the shape below that matches what you are selling, write down what happens to unused capacity, and set a review date before the first invoice rather than after the first awkward month.
Then price the shape rather than the hours it might contain. A capacity block can reasonably be built up from what a day rate would have cost, less something for the certainty of a standing booking. Availability cannot be built that way at all, because what is being charged for is the work you will turn down and the concentration you will not get back. If the figure you arrive at looks suspiciously like a discount on days, you have priced the wrong product and the client will treat it accordingly.
Shape
What the client gets
What you owe in return
Where it breaks
Reserved capacity
An agreed block of time each month, filled with whatever they choose
The time, held open, whether or not a good use is found for it
Quiet months feel like theft to them; then they want a whole quarter at once
Availability on call
A promised response time and a place at the front of your queue
To be reachable within stated hours and to drop other things
Nothing caps how much can be asked for inside the promise
Maintained outcome
A standing state: the site stays up, campaigns keep running, reports arrive
The result, however long it takes in a given month
A calm first month sets the price, then the system ages and the work grows
Advisory access
Your judgement to hand: reviews, second opinions, hiring and vendor calls
Attention and candour, explicitly not production work
It slides into delivery one small favour at a time
Drawn-down block
A bank of pre-purchased time at a price agreed in advance
Honouring a figure you set before you knew the year
Rollover without an expiry becomes an unbounded debt you cannot schedule
In practice
These three clauses settle the arguments that end most retained arrangements. None of them is aggressive; each simply says out loud what both sides had privately assumed.
“Capacity not used in a given month lapses at the end of it. Where requests in a month exceed the retained capacity, the excess is estimated and agreed in writing before that work begins.”
“Either party may end this arrangement on the notice set out above. Work already commissioned before notice is given is completed and invoiced in the ordinary way.”
“The retained fee covers advisory and maintenance activity. New builds, migrations and campaigns are quoted separately, whether or not they arise from advice given under this arrangement.”
Time sold by the day is triggered by a decision the client has already taken, and unused days simply are not sold. A retained fee falls due whether or not the month produced anything to do.
Growth inside a retained arrangement does not appear as extra deliverables. It appears as the definition of a quick favour expanding month by month while the fee sits exactly where it was agreed.
Key takeaways
→Name which shape you are selling, in writing, before the first invoice; most disputes are two parties assuming different ones.
→Justify the fee as reserved attention and retained knowledge, not as a bundle of hours you will later be asked to account for.
→Say whether unused capacity lapses, and fix a review date while both sides are still pleased with each other.
When does this beat billing each project separately?
Where work is continuous but unpredictable in shape, and where re-explaining the situation every time would cost real money. Where the work is occasional and self-contained, project pricing is simpler and cheaper for both sides, and pretending otherwise breeds resentment in the empty months.
Should unused capacity roll over?
Better that it lapses, agreed in writing at the start. Rollover turns your future diary into a liability that a client can call in during your busiest fortnight, and it converts the arrangement into a discounted block of time. If you do allow it, cap how far it can carry and put an expiry on it.
How do I raise a retained fee without losing the client?
Tie the conversation to the review date you agreed at the outset, so it arrives as a scheduled event rather than a demand. Bring what the year contained: the interruptions absorbed, the things that did not break, the decisions made quickly because you already knew the system. Give notice with a date and let them plan.
Sources
The primary text this definition rests on. Read it before relying on this one.
