Why we don't retain — and what we offer instead.

Retainers are a comfortable arrangement for the agency and a soft trap for the operator. The agency books predictable revenue. The operator pays whether or not the work is moving the row on the P&L. Six months in, nobody can tell you whether the spend is working.

We've watched this happen across the service businesses we've sat across from, and we don't operate that way. Every PYJ engagement is a fixed-price, fixed-timeline build with a defined deliverable. We diagnose the leak in two weeks. We propose the smallest build that closes it. We ship in two-to-six weeks. We stabilise it for ninety days. We hand it over — code, accounts, repo, domain — to you.

Then we leave. If you want us back for the next leak, that's a new build with a new price. If you don't, the build is yours. The repo is yours. The customer list is yours. There's no off-ramp because there was never a vendor lock-in to begin with.

The follow-up question is always the same: what about the long tail of bug fixes and tweaks? That's why ninety days of stabilisation is included in every build. By the end of week twelve, the system has met reality, the operator has answered the questions that only show up in production, and the documentation is current. After that, you should be running it without us.

There are exceptions. Two operators on the books today have rolling support contracts because the systems we built are doing things complicated enough — bespoke EHR integrations, regulated data workflows — that quarterly tuning is genuinely useful. Those contracts have a 30-day notice period. We'd rather you stop paying us than feel obligated.

If you're considering a retainer with another shop and want a second opinion, send the scope. We'll tell you whether what they're proposing should be a one-off build instead.