Why we don’t do retainers.

We don't do retainers because the moment you bill by the month, you get paid to look busy instead of to finish. Almost a Lab sells fixed-scope engagements. Forge is a 12-week fixed-price build. Orbit is an equity co-build where we own the upside with you. The one recurring arrangement we keep is Masthead Evolve, and it survives for a specific reason I'll get to. Everything else is priced against an outcome, not a calendar.

The honest math on retainers

A retainer is a standing monthly bill in exchange for availability. Think about what that actually rewards. The vendor's revenue continues whether the work ships next week or next quarter. Finishing the project ends the invoice. So the incentive, quietly, is to never quite finish. Nobody on the agency side has to be cynical for this to happen. It's structural. You point a smart team at a monthly check and ask them to keep the relationship going, and the relationship is what they optimize.

I've watched this from both chairs. The status call that exists to justify the status call. The scope that grows soft at the edges so there's always one more thing. The senior people who quietly rotate off once the contract is signed, because the contract doesn't care who does the work, only that the hours get logged. None of that is a moral failure. It's the contract doing exactly what you designed it to do.

Retainers pay for attention. Fixed scope pays for a finished thing. Those are not the same purchase, and pretending they are is how good teams end up resenting each other.

The deeper problem is that a retainer hides the question that matters. You should always be able to ask: is this done? With a monthly bill, that question is rude. With a fixed scope, it's the whole point. We want you asking it.

Why we price fixed scope

Forge is twelve weeks, fixed price, defined output. We agree on what we're building and what it costs before we start. That single move flips every incentive in the room. We are now paid to finish, because finishing is when we get paid and when we're free to take the next build. Speed stops being a thing we'd have to bill against our own interest. It becomes the interest.

Fixed scope also forces honesty up front. You can't quote a fixed price on a vague idea, so we do the hard thinking before the contract instead of discovering it on your dime in month four. The scoping conversation gets sharper. We say no to the parts that don't earn their place. You get a number you can plan around and a date you can hold us to.

Orbit is the other side of the same belief. When we co-build a product and take equity, our outcome is the product working, not the months passing. That's the strongest version of aligned incentives I know of. We win when you win, on the same timeline, for the same reason.

• A retainer pays for time. Time is the vendor's to spend, and spending more of it is good for the vendor.
• Fixed scope pays for a result. The result is yours, and getting to it faster is good for everyone.
• Equity pays for the upside. Now we're not even on opposite sides of the table.

The one place recurring work still makes sense

Masthead Evolve is recurring, and I stand behind it. Here's the distinction that makes it work. Evolve is quarterly, and every quarter is scoped on its own. We agree on what ships in the quarter, and we bill for that work shipping, not for hours we happened to spend being available. It's a series of small fixed-scope agreements wearing a subscription's clothes, not an open-ended meter.

Some work is genuinely continuous. A live site needs steady iteration: new sections, performance, content, the slow compounding improvements that a one-time build can't cover. Evolve exists for exactly that. The guardrail is that each quarter still has a defined output you can point to. If a quarter goes by and you can't see what we shipped, the arrangement has failed, and we've built it so you'd notice. That's the test every recurring engagement should have to pass. Evolve passes it. A retainer is designed so you can't run the test at all.

So that's the whole position. We price for outcomes because outcomes are what you're buying. We keep one recurring product, and we keep it honest by scoping every cycle and shipping work instead of billing time. If a vendor can't tell you what done looks like, you're not paying for a result. You're paying for the meeting.