Retainer Pricing Calculator

A retainer trades a discount for certainty, and that is usually a fair trade. The part nobody prices is what happens when the client uses more hours than they bought, which is most clients most months.

This gives you the number the whole arrangement turns on: the hours at which it stops clearing the rate you set as your floor. On the defaults that is twenty-two, and the client is using twenty-six — so the freelancer is working at $72.69 against a floor of $75 and has no idea, because the monthly figure has not changed.

It also names the second discount, the one that is never negotiated because it is never noticed. The commitment discount is agreed out loud. The overage rate set below your normal rate is agreed by nobody, and it means the arrangement gets worse for you the busier it gets, which is precisely backwards. The page tells you which way round yours is, and the rate that fixes it.

Underneath is the same retainer run at every level of usage, from well under the allowance to well over it, with the line marked. Retainer hours drift upward. They very rarely drift down, and the version you agree to is the version you have for a year.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all.

It cannot tell you what a client will accept, or whether guaranteed income is worth the discount to you — that is a judgement and it stays yours. What it can do is put a figure on both sides of it before you answer the email.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.