Sell support by the month
and know what it costs
A support retainer is the easiest thing to sell and the hardest to keep profitable, because the thing being consumed is measured in minutes nobody writes down. Measure them, and the whole agreement becomes something you can price.
Retainers require Team or Business. Business includes one support inbox seat.
What each client is consuming, while the period is still running.
The retainer you priced is not the retainer you're delivering
Support retainers are sold on an estimate, then delivered for years without anybody checking the estimate. The client who was quoted ten hours a month is now taking eighteen, and the only evidence is a general feeling that they are hard work.
It goes wrong because support consumption is invisible by default. Nobody logs a four-minute reply, so the allowance is spent by a process with no record.
- The allowance was a guess at signing, and has never been checked against reality.
- Support arrives as email, which is the one place hours never get recorded.
- The person answering has no idea how much of the month is already gone.
- At renewal you argue for a bigger retainer with no numbers to point at.
- One client is quietly subsidised by the rest, and you cannot prove which.
Three things a support retainer needs
An allowance that counts down honestly, a meter where the spending happens, and an invoice at the end you did not have to reconstruct.
An allowance that counts down as it is used
Set the hours and the period. Time logged against the retainer project counts down the allowance as it is logged, including non-billable work. The retainer belongs to that project, so client-only time does not consume it. The budget resets on its own cycle, whether that is weekly, monthly, quarterly, or something you defined yourself.
- Weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly or custom periods, per client
- Auto-reset at the end of each period, with a fresh allowance
- Choose recipients for threshold warnings and overrun alerts by email and in the app
- Hours over the allowance are still tracked, never silently dropped
The meter, where the spending happens
A retainer is spent by whoever is answering the client, so that is where the number has to be. With the Customer Support Inbox, requests arrive in Hour Cap with the retainer meter beside them.
Somebody deciding whether this request deserves twenty minutes or two hours can see that the month has two and a half hours left in it, at the moment they are deciding.
- Client mail forwarded into a shared inbox inside Hour Cap
- Match senders using synced contacts, or link an unmatched conversation to a client
- Start a timer or log a duration from the thread, against the retainer
- Replies go out from your own domain, under your agency name
An add-on at $12 per seat per month, and only for the people who answer client mail.
Morning. Two customers rang this week to say their Amex card bounced at checkout. Visa goes through fine. Can someone take a look before the weekend sale?
Hi Priya, found it. Amex was failing the address check on the new gateway rules. Fixed and tested both cards this morning, so you are clear for the sale.
Invoice the period from the record
Choose the billing method that matches the agreement. An hourly retainer invoices selected eligible time from completed periods. A fixed retainer invoices the agreed fee for started periods, including the current one, independently of hours used. Review the amount and create a draft in Xero.
- Select hourly entries from completed periods, or fixed fees for started periods
- Track separately chargeable extra work on a separate hourly project
- Hourly lines can be grouped; fixed fees use a project and period description
- Drafts land in Xero for review before anything is sent
The fee stays $4,500. Discuss the extra 2.5h with the client; covered time is not automatically billed again as overage.
Renewal is a numbers conversation
Keeping a support retainer profitable comes down to whether you can put a figure on the table at renewal.
From guessed allowance to priced agreement
The first period is measurement. After that you are working from evidence.
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Model
Enter the agreement you actually signed
The allowance the client is paying for, on the period they are paying for it, with an alert at 80%. Not the allowance you wish you had sold.
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Measure
Let one period tell you the truth
Forward the support address so the requests are captured where they arrive. One full period of real consumption is usually enough to see whether the agreement was priced anywhere near correctly.
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Reprice
Take the number to the renewal
Invoice each period through Xero as you go, and arrive at the renewal with consumption per client rather than an impression. The agreement that comes out of that conversation is one you can deliver.
Common questions
Why I built Hour Cap
I'm Jonathan, a freelance web developer in Brisbane, Australia. After 15 years, I wanted my client work to run on one system instead of separate tools that didn't handle retainers or Xero, copy/paste errors, and time that never got invoiced. I needed one tool that handled retainers, fixed-price, and hourly projects, let me write proper multi-line descriptions, showed me what was actually profitable, and pushed straight to Xero as invoices. Nothing did all of it, so I built one. Today it is pivotal to my business: all my time tracking, invoice drafting, and profitability runs through Hour Cap, and it scales the same way for agencies and teams.
Independent and self-funded. When you email support, you reach the person who built it.
More about JonathanKnow what your support retainers cost
One period of measured consumption is usually enough to see whether the agreement was priced correctly. Start with this one.