What a Retainer Should Include

The problem with the usual wording

Most retainer proposals describe ongoing support, continuous optimisation, regular maintenance, and monthly reporting.

None of those is a deliverable. Each is a category, and a supplier who does nothing in a given month has not obviously breached any of them.

The result is an arrangement neither side can evaluate: the client suspects they are paying for nothing, the supplier feels unappreciated for work that was genuinely done, and both are right because there is no shared record of what was expected.

Itemising it fixes that, and it protects the supplier at least as much as the client.

What an itemised retainer looks like

• Done every month, listed: updates, backups, checks, a report.
• Done every quarter or annually: reviews, audits, testing.
• A number of hours for change work, stated.
• Response times for normal requests and for outages.
• What is out of scope and how it is priced.
• What happens to unused hours.

That fits on one page and turns a monthly invoice into something with a list behind it.

The maintenance half

Worth being specific about, since it is where most of the recurring value sits and it is invisible when done properly.

Platform and plugin updates, applied and checked rather than applied and hoped.

Backups taken, held somewhere other than the same server, and tested occasionally rather than assumed.

Security monitoring and certificate renewal.

Uptime monitoring with somebody actually receiving the alert.

And a check that forms still deliver, which is the item most often absent and the one that costs the most when it fails.

A retainer covering only these is a legitimate arrangement and should be priced and described as maintenance rather than as marketing.

The change hours

The part that causes most of the friction, and it is resolved by naming a number.

State the hours included per month, what a typical request consumes, and how additional work is priced.

Without that, every request becomes a negotiation about whether it is covered, which is unpleasant for both parties and eventually stops the client asking at all.

A client who has stopped asking is a client about to leave, and the supplier usually does not notice until the cancellation arrives.

Settle whether unused hours roll over, and if they do, cap the accumulation, since an open-ended bank of hours becomes a liability nobody has budgeted for.

Response times, stated separately

Two different things get conflated and they need different commitments.

A routine change, such as updating a price or adding a page, needs a reasonable turnaround: a few working days is normal and should be written down.

An outage or a broken form is a different category, and needs a response time in hours with a route that does not depend on one person reading email.

Establish who to contact out of hours, whether that is included, and what it costs if not.

A retainer with no distinction between these is one where a down site waits behind a request to change a phone number.

A worked example

A firm paid a monthly retainer described as website maintenance and digital support for three years.

Asked what it covered, neither side could produce a list.

Rewriting it took an afternoon: updates and backups monthly, a forms test and a link check quarterly, a performance and accessibility review annually, three hours of changes a month rolling over to a maximum of nine, three working days for routine requests, four hours for anything down.

The fee did not change.

Both sides described the relationship as better within two months, for the same money and largely the same work.

The client stopped wondering what they were paying for, and the supplier stopped absorbing requests that had never been in scope.

The report nobody reads

A specific item worth examining rather than accepting.

Monthly reports are a standard retainer inclusion and are frequently an automated export of numbers with no interpretation, which nobody opens after the third month.

That is time being spent producing something with no value, and it is worth redirecting.

What is useful is short: what changed, what was done, what it means, and what is recommended next. Half a page beats twenty.

If neither party will miss the report, replace it with a fifteen-minute call each quarter, which produces more understanding and takes less time to prepare.

What should not be in it

Two things worth keeping out.

Anything with a guaranteed outcome attached, particularly ranking positions, which nobody controls and which turns a service arrangement into a promise that cannot be kept.

And hosting bundled invisibly with the rest, since it obscures both the cost and the question of who controls the account.

Keep hosting itemised even where the same supplier provides it, so you can see what it costs and move it if you need to.

The same applies to domain renewals, licences, and any third-party subscriptions being paid on your behalf.

The counter-case

Itemisation can be taken too far and produce its own problem.

A retainer specified in minute detail encourages both sides to work to the document rather than to the situation, and a supplier who has completed the list has an argument for declining anything else.

The best arrangements have a clear list and a working relationship, and the relationship is what handles the month where something unexpected matters more than the scheduled work.

There is also a size below which this is disproportionate. A small monthly fee for hosting and occasional help does not need a service agreement, and imposing one adds administration to something that was working.

The threshold is roughly whether you would notice if nothing happened for two months. If you would not, the arrangement needs a list.

What to ask for

1. The monthly list, itemised.
2. The quarterly and annual items.
3. Hours included and what a typical request uses.
4. Rollover rules and a cap.
5. Two response times: routine and outage.
6. Hosting and licences itemised separately.
7. A quarterly call instead of a report nobody reads.

Asking for this is not adversarial, and a supplier who resists producing a one-page list has told you something useful.

What service commitments actually mean is covered in uptime percentages in hours.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.