Monthly design retainer pricing, with nothing behind a call
Most retainer pricing pages end with "book a call to get a quote." Ours is just the numbers: $150/hr, every service, with a 50-hour monthly minimum, so about $7,500 a month at entry. Month-to-month, 30-day cancellation, unused hours roll over.
The rate card
Scroll sideways for all columns →
| Item | Published number |
|---|---|
| Retainer rate, all services | $150/hr |
| Level 1 (entry) | 50 hrs/mo minimum ≈ $7,500/mo |
| Levels 2, 3, Enterprise | More hours, same $150 rate |
| Billing | Monthly, month-to-month, no hidden fees |
| Cancellation | 30 days' notice |
| Rollover | Unused hours carry forward, capped at 100% of the month's retained hours |
| Ad-hoc project rate (no retainer) | $200/hr |
| Brand Hero Refresh package | from $2.5K fixed |
| Scale-Ready Website Design package | $20K fixed |
One deliberate absence from that table: tiers with different rates. Plenty of vendors price design hours differently from development hours; we think that's how clients end up rationing the wrong discipline mid-project. Hours are hours. Spend them on whatever the month needs.
Rollover, worked through with actual arithmetic
"Hours roll over" appears on a lot of pricing pages and means a different thing on each one, so here is precisely what ours means, using the published rule: unused hours carry forward, capped at 100% of that month's retained hours.
Say you're on Level 1 at 50 hours. In March the team bills 38; the leftover 12 carry into April, where you now have 62 available. April turns busy and uses 60. May starts with 52. The cap only appears if quiet months stack: carry-over can never exceed one full month's retained hours, so at 50 retained you'll never sit on more than 50 banked. You cannot bank a year of hours, and we'd rather say so in the open than in month eleven.
Why it matters is the money. A "use it or lose it" retainer quietly raises your real hourly rate every quiet month; pay $7,500 and use 38 hours with no rollover and those hours cost you $197 each. With rollover, they stay $150, just delayed. Marketing workloads are lumpy. Pricing should absorb that instead of profiting from it.
Retainer or project rate: the actual decision
The $150 retained rate against the $200 ad-hoc rate is a 25% discount for committed volume, worth $2,500 a month at 50 hours. So the decision is really about your demand curve, and we'll argue against ourselves where that's the honest read.
- Steady, varied demand (the landing-page-deck-and-site-update stream of a working B2B SaaS marketing team): take the retainer. This is the profile behind our published client savings of $291K–$498K a year versus in-house teams, and behind retainers like Saviynt's 4+ years and 10,000+ hours.
- One defined project, then quiet: take $200/hr ad-hoc or a fixed package. The Scale-Ready Website Design at $20K exists so a single build doesn't need a monthly commitment wrapped around it.
- Small, occasional needs: the Brand Hero Refresh from $2.5K is the honest entry, and a freelancer may be honest competition for it.
For scale on the first option: the in-house department a retainer replaces runs $300–800K a year at 50–60% productive utilization. The calculator compares your numbers in about a minute. One process note since pricing pages usually hide it: the work itself comes from a senior bench (creative director; developer and PM at 15+ years; designer at 12) working in your own Slack, Asana, Trello, or Notion, with AI on production and the named seniors on judgment, which is how one rate covers four disciplines.
