A retainer is for businesses whose website keeps needing work — not a maintenance plan with a bigger number on it. The point is having a developer who already knows your site when you need one.
Quoting every change works until changes are constant. Then the overhead becomes the problem: a fortnight of scoping and quoting for two days of work, repeated monthly, and a developer who re-learns your codebase each time because three months have passed.
A retainer removes both. An agreed block of hours each month, a named developer who holds the context, and priority on scheduling — so work starts when you need it rather than when a gap appears.
This is distinct from our care plans. A care plan is hosting plus an hour of upkeep for a single site. A retainer is development capacity, from ten hours a month, for organisations actively building things.
What we do
Working UK-wide — directly with businesses, and white label behind design and marketing agencies.
Discuss a projectThe same person, who knows your platform and its history. The single biggest reason retained work is faster than ad-hoc work.
Retained time is reserved. Your work starts when you need it rather than waiting for capacity to appear.
Block-booked hours cost less per hour than ad-hoc work, because we can plan around them.
What the hours go on is decided month to month. No change request process for work you have already paid for.
You speak to the developer rather than relaying through an account manager who then relays it back.
Context is held rather than rebuilt. On a long-running platform this compounds considerably.
Below that the context-switching costs more than the arrangement saves. If you need less, a care plan is the better fit and we will say so.
How unused hours are treated is set out in your agreement rather than fixed across the board. We will be clear about it before you commit.
Large pieces of work are still scoped and planned. The retainer removes the quote-per-change overhead, not the thinking.
A lot of our work is delivered white label or under agreement, so these describe the problem and the approach rather than naming the client.
Ten brand websites across one instruments group. Several we built, the rest we inherited — and all ten are hosted, maintained and supported by the same team.
Web application · IntegrationAn API-connected membership platform handling publications, events and a two-way CRM sync — thousands of profiles and hundreds of transactions a week.
Migration · DevelopmentFive separate legacy CMS sites, five databases and five themes, consolidated into a single multilingual multisite CMS platform.
The work you keep quoting for, or the thing nobody in-house has time to own. That tells us whether a retainer is the right shape and roughly what size it should be.