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Studio·Mar 15, 2026·6 min
Why we stopped doing open-ended retainers.
They paid well. They wrecked the studio. Here's what replaced them.
They paid well. They wrecked the studio. Here's what replaced them.
For the first eighteen months of Microsive, about half our revenue came from open-ended retainers.
Monthly agreements, loosely scoped, ongoing. A client would say "we need you around" and we'd agree on a monthly number and show up. It felt good. Predictable revenue. Relationships that lasted. No constant selling.
It was also the worst thing we did for the quality of our work.
An open retainer has no natural end. There's no shipped thing, no handed-over product, no moment where you both look at something and say: done.
Without that moment, work expands to fill the container. The team spends four hours a week on a Slack channel that should take forty minutes. A small feature becomes a large one because there's no reason to scope it tightly — the budget isn't attached to the scope. Decisions that should take a day take a week because nobody's tracking that a week costs real money.
The client doesn't notice this happening. Neither do you, at first. The pace feels fine. Everyone's responsive. The relationship is warm. And then six months in you look at what actually shipped and realise the output was about a third of what it would have been if there'd been a deadline.
In mid-2023 we had four active open retainers simultaneously. Each one was with a client we liked, paying a reasonable rate, doing work we were proud of.
The studio was at capacity. No new projects. No Friday demos with clear deliverables. Just four ongoing streams of loosely defined work.
Meera — our PM — started tracking what we actually shipped each month versus what we'd agreed to. The numbers were bad. Not dishonestly bad. Just... diffuse. A lot of small things. A lot of "we're working on it." A lot of meetings that probably should have been documents.
The retainers weren't bad work. They were just not our best work.
We didn't stop working with clients on an ongoing basis. We just changed what the engagement looked like.
Now, every ongoing engagement — regardless of how long it runs — has a scope attached to each month. Before the month starts, we agree on what that month contains. Not a vague "we'll work on the platform." Something specific: "this month we build the reconciliation report and migrate the user permission model."
At the end of the month, both sides can see whether that happened. And either side can pause, adjust, or stop.
The pricing is similar to what retainers were. The relationship is warmer, not colder — because now we're both accountable to something real. The client knows what they're paying for. We know what we're delivering.
Scope is not a constraint. Scope is a kindness.
When a client knows what's in a month, they can trust the output. When they don't know, they can only hope. Hope is a terrible foundation for a working relationship.
The absence of scope also makes it easy for a client to feel like they're not getting enough, even when the team is working hard. Scope makes the work visible. Without it, you're just paying a monthly number and watching the calendar.
Retainers without scope attract a specific kind of scope creep that's very hard to say no to.
Because there's no defined boundary, every new request is "part of the retainer." You spend a Monday fixing a bug that shouldn't exist. Tuesday someone needs a quick dashboard. Thursday there's an urgent integration. None of these were in any agreement. All of them feel reasonable in isolation. Together, they're three weeks of your team's time in a single month that were never priced.
With scope defined in advance, the answer to "can you also do this?" is: "yes, and here's what that does to the current scope, and here's what it costs to add it." That conversation is not awkward. It's just information. Both sides have it. Both sides make a decision.
We haven't had a scope dispute since we made the change. Not one.
Open-ended retainers are comfortable until they aren't. Scope-defined engagements take more upfront work and produce better outcomes. The relationship doesn't suffer. It improves, because both sides know what they're building together.
If you're a studio still running open retainers, try scoping one month explicitly and see what happens. We think you'll find the conversation you were avoiding is the one that makes everything easier.