Care plan or retainer: where the money actually goes

The question I get most often after a project ships: "Can I just pay you monthly to handle everything?"

My answer is always the same: yes: but not as a retainer. Here's why.

The Retainer Problem

A traditional retainer charges for time blocks. You pay for a fixed bank of hours, say 40 a month, whether or not 40 hours of useful work exists. That's the deal.

But think about what that actually means:

• You're paying for hours, not outcomes
• If the developer works fast, you still pay for 40 hours
• If nothing needs done, you still pay for 40 hours
• You're incentivized to use up your hours, not solve problems

It's an hourly model disguised as a subscription. You're not buying peace of mind: you're buying a time budget.

The Care Plan Model

A care plan charges for results. Not hours.

At $299/mo: Essential Care, you get:

• 24/7 automated uptime and error monitoring
• Dependency and security patching
• A monthly Core Web Vitals and speed audit
• An emergency hotfix SLA: first human response within 8 hours, any day
• Automated backups, SSL and DNS handled

Notice there is no hour counter on that list. Nothing here is metered: care is priced on published deliverables, not on blocks of someone's time.

At $899/mo: Growth Sprint Plan:

• Everything in Essential Care, plus
• Two shipped conversion or feature updates a month
• A sub-1.4s LCP target on the pages we touch
• 48-hour turnaround on UI/UX tweaks
• A direct Slack or WhatsApp channel

At $2,200/mo: Fractional Product Partner:

• Everything in Growth, plus
• A continuous async feature queue, shipping every 48–72 hours
• Full Next.js / Node / PostgreSQL architecture ownership
• CI/CD and query-path optimization
• Weekly async Loom progress demos

The difference is outcome-based. You're not buying hours. You're buying a product that stays alive, stays fast, and keeps growing.

Advisory: Pure Knowledge, No Code

Sometimes you don't need a developer at all. You need a senior brain on your architecture, your tech stack, your code quality.

That's what advisory is:

• Architecture & Code Audit Retainer: $600/mo: up to 4 hours a month of live architecture review, pull request audits, database schema review, and hiring or vendor vetting
• Fractional CTO Advisory: $1,200/mo: up to 10 hours a month of technical leadership, roadmap scoping, stack and infrastructure audits, and direct team unblocking

No code commitment. No hours tracking. Just senior-level thinking applied to your product.

Care plans are priced the same way: on SLAs and deliverables, not hour caps. Essential Care ($299/mo) is monitoring, patching and a monthly speed audit; Growth ($899/mo) adds two shipped updates a month; Fractional Product Partner ($2,200/mo) is a continuous feature queue. Advisory is the one place hours are quoted, because that is literally what you are buying: senior judgement.

Why This Matters

The shift from "buy hours" to "buy outcomes" is the same shift that took us from taxi services to Uber. You don't care about the driver's hourly rate: you care about getting where you're going on time.

Care plans give you that for your software. You care about uptime, not logged hours. You care about security, not timesheets.

The Bottom Line

Model	What You Pay For	Risk
Fixed-price retainer	Hours (time blocks)	You get what you pay for in time, not necessarily results
Care plan	Uptime, security, features	You get outcomes: a working product
Advisory	Senior expertise	You get decisions, not hours

Choose a care plan if you want your product to survive. Choose advisory if you want it to evolve. Choose both if you want it to dominate.

No fixed-price retainers. Only results delivered.

---

Global service. Same plans for every client, regardless of timezone.