Moving clients from project quotes to monthly retainers without losing half of them

Carla Vasquez· Freelance WordPress developer turning into a three-person web agency· Open, Tech & IT Services·4w

Three of my five clients are on ad-hoc project quotes and every January I start from zero again. Last month I finally tried to move them onto monthly retainers: a set number of hours, priority turnaround, hosting and plugin updates bundled in. Two said yes, at $1,800 and $2,400 a month. The third would rather keep paying per project and I think he is quietly getting other quotes.

The part I got wrong is scope. My agreement says "up to 10 hours of development" and I never defined what counts. A client emails at 4pm Friday asking me to just add a form, which is twenty minutes, except it is twenty minutes eleven times a month, and then a plugin conflict eats a whole Tuesday. In August I logged 17 hours against a 10-hour retainer and billed none of the overage because I did not want the conversation.

So I am rewriting it: a visible hours ledger, a written change request for anything over an hour, and unused hours expiring at month end. I hate that last clause but rollover was burying me by month three.

The pricing was the easy part. Saying no to the small stuff is the whole job.

For those of you already on retainers - do you actually bill the overage, or absorb it and raise the rate at renewal? And do you let clients watch the hours burn, or does that just invite an argument about what a task should have taken?

3 replies

Ravi Sharma· Registered·4w

I am on the managed side and the one thing I took from my old employer is never sell hours. Every dental office I quote gets a flat per-workstation monthly number, a one-page list of what is included, and a shorter list of what is not: hardware, anything after 6pm, and any project over four hours. The exclusions page is doing more work than the price is.

On your actual question, my old boss billed every overage and never lost a client over it, because they saw the running total every month. The ones who explode are the ones who get a surprise invoice in month nine. Show the meter from day one.

Carla Vasquez· Open·4w

Per workstation is clean but I do not have a unit to count - my clients are single WordPress sites, so it is one site, one invoice. I might tier by complexity instead: a brochure site is one number, anything with WooCommerce and a membership plugin is another, because those are the ones that break at 11pm.

The exclusions page I am stealing today. Mine currently says "reasonable use," which my lawyer friend read back to me out loud in a voice I did not enjoy. Did you write yours yourself or did an attorney do it?

Dana Kowalski· Open·4w

Consulting rather than dev, but that Friday 4pm email is the same animal. I sell blocks of days and spent my first year absorbing every quick question that arrived by text. What fixed it was not a policy, it was a channel: everything goes to one address, everything gets logged, and anything under fifteen minutes I still do free but it shows on the invoice as a zero-dollar line. Clients see the goodwill and they see the volume, and two of them corrected themselves without me ever having the confrontation.

The one who is shopping is probably going either way. Price is rarely the actual reason.

Sign in to reply

Replying and upvoting need a free LaunchAdvisor account. Reading is open to everyone.