Retainer fee

[megfenn]

Hi all you web designers - do any of you charge a monthly retainer fee? I don't but just wondering if I should be. I know other design agencies do and ones that offer ongoing cms do as well. What about you guys on here that work for yourself/run your own business?

[megfenn]

And just to add to my post, for businesses if you use the same web designer on a regular basis do you pay them a retainer fee? if not, would you be happy to? What type of service would you expect for a retainer fee?

[Arianna]

I don't - I just charge by the hour for support issues (they get billed when they've had an hours worth of time so might not be for 2 months) unless they have a support package which was purchased at the time of the site being designed/hosted.

It is something I've thought about though.

Meant to also say that this is something I'm seriously thinking about introducing for the bookkeeping side of things so that it helps make it so clients don't pay a huge amount at the end of the year (or whenever I do their bookkeeping).

Arianna

[MrTempleDene]

I do, I charge an annual fee for both hosting and a licence to use the content management system, that includes support and all updates/bug fixes etc.

[obscure]

We don't charge a retainer fee but we do have monthly maintenance packages that we have recently introduced and offer at the outset with new clients.

They are very reasonable and start from £10 per month, ontop of the hosting fee. This gives clients a reduced hourly fee for maintenance work. They can also top up their account with a bulk amount (one client keeps his at £100 so he knows he can pay for anything he needs doing).

Our ecommerce websites we include any bug fix patches in the initial price, but upgrades to newer versions are quoted by maintenance time -so if people want the new features they pay for the time taken to upgrade.

We are looking at introducing a yearly fee for the ecommerce carts to include upgrades to recent versions of the cart as we are always adding new features that clients can make use of. For us in many ways it can work out better having all clients on the same version too! We need to work out pricings on that as obviously we have an upfront charge for the cart and site design, and the monthly hosting if they use our hosting which many do - but not all.

Good luck with whatever you choose to do :)
Sadie