Website maintenance retainer
A fixed monthly budget instead of an invoice per change. Scheduled work on a calendar and a contractor who remembers your project.
What's included
- Monthly allowance of hours
- Scheduled routine work
- Small changes without new contracts
- Unused hours partially roll over
- Predictable budgeting
- One accountable contractor
- Monthly time report
A maintenance retainer and technical support are related but genuinely different things, and confusing them costs money. Support answers the question of what happens when something breaks: on-call cover, response times, incidents. A retainer answers a different question — who looks after the site during ordinary life: routine work, regular edits, gradual improvement.
The difference shows up in how the money works. Hourly billing looks cheaper, but every trivial change needs an estimate, an approval and an invoice, and that paperwork takes longer than the change itself. The result is that small tasks pile up for months because nobody wants to bother anyone over something minor. A retainer removes that friction: there's an allowance of hours and a person you can simply message.
How we work
- Size the work. We look at the site and talk through what a normal month contains: how many edits, which routine tasks, whether there's ongoing development. Then we pick an allowance that matches reality rather than padding it.
- Build the schedule. What happens regularly and when: updates, backup verification, certificate renewals, database cleanup. These run on their own without you having to remember them.
- Take in tasks. As a list, by email, or in chat — whatever suits you. Small items need no separate approval; larger ones get estimated first.
- Track the hours. Every task is logged with the time it took. At month end you can see exactly where the allowance went.
- Roll over what's left. Unused hours don't simply evaporate — a portion carries into the following month, so a quiet period offsets a busy one.
- Report. Once a month you get a summary: what was done, what it cost in hours, and what we suggest for the next period.
What you get
A predictable budget — one line in your accounts instead of unpredictable invoices. Small tasks stop accumulating because the barrier to asking disappears. And most valuably, a contractor who remembers the project: no explaining from scratch every time what this site is, where things live, and why something was built the way it was.
If you need guaranteed response times for outages — an on-call engineer, an SLA, round-the-clock monitoring — that's technical support, priced by response speed. Plenty of clients take both: a retainer for routine work and a support plan for incidents. If most of your tasks are content — products, copy, promotions — see content support.
Timeline
We start with a trial month, which is what reveals the true volume and lets the allowance be adjusted. After that it runs month to month with automatic renewal. Tasks within the allowance are delivered to an agreed window, typically one to three working days depending on complexity. Scheduled work follows its own calendar regardless of what you send in.
A typical scenario
Consider a company sitting on a backlog of small things: fix the phone number in the header, swap three photographs, add a careers page, update the price list. Each is twenty minutes of work, but commissioning them individually is awkward — approval and invoicing take longer than the job. The list sits untouched for six months while the site slowly goes stale. Under a retainer that backlog clears in a single session within the allowance, and new small items stop accumulating because sending them became easier than postponing them.