Ongoing support is easy to sell and hard to describe. The word covers everything from fixing a broken form to building a campaign microsite, which is why it so often turns into an argument about value halfway through the engagement.
The four kinds of work
Almost everything in a month falls into one of four buckets. Fixes, where something is broken and needs to stop being broken. Changes, where something works but should work differently. Additions, where a page or component does not exist yet. And maintenance, where nothing visible happens but the site stays healthy.
Naming the buckets helps because they have different urgency and different cost. Treating them as one undifferentiated queue is what makes retainers feel arbitrary.
A useful test
At the end of a month, look at what shipped and ask whether any of it could have waited another six months without cost. If most of it could have, the retainer is buying insurance rather than progress, and that is worth saying out loud.
