Project, retainer or managed service: choosing your model

The commercial model matters more than most people expect. The same team doing the same work under the wrong arrangement produces a bad experience for everyone, usually because the model rewards the wrong thing.

We offer three, and the honest answer to "which one" depends less on your budget than on how your need arrives.

Project

A defined outcome with a start and an end. A website, a portal, a migration. You know what you want, we scope it, we build it, you accept it, and the engagement finishes.

This is the right model when the work has an edge to it. It is the wrong model when what you actually need is somebody available, because you will spend the year raising small projects and paying the overhead of scoping each one.

Retainer

An agreed number of hours a month against a backlog you control. Good when you have a system that keeps evolving and no appetite to negotiate every change.

The failure mode is a retainer nobody uses. If three months pass with hours unspent, the model is wrong and we will say so rather than keep invoicing.

Managed service

We run it. Monitoring, patching, backups, the help desk, and a named person who knows your setup. You are buying an outcome, which is that it keeps working, rather than an amount of time.

This is the right model when the cost of the thing being down is higher than the cost of watching it. For most organisations that point arrives earlier than they think, usually the first time email stops on a Monday morning.

How to choose

Ask what happens when something breaks at nine on a Saturday. If the answer is "it can wait until Monday", a project or a retainer is fine. If the answer is that people cannot work, you want a managed service and a response target in writing.

We will tell you which one we think fits, including when that is the cheaper one.