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Regarding maintenance retainers: I have been in a loop where customers realize they haven't "used" their monthly retainer and dump requests on me in the last week of each month. Did you experience this? Would love to come up with a tactful solution to this.

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This is happening because you pitched to them x amount of time for x amount of money. Instead re-frame it as included in the price is: server maintenance, backup scheduling, bug fixes and monitoring, minor tweaks etc.

When you frame the monthly cost like this, the customer feels almost like it's an insurance policy rather than paying for your time they aren't using.

Havre different customers on different schedules? Customer A is on retainer 1st to 1st, customer B 10th to 10th and so on.

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