Same team, not a support desk
The people who built the store keep running it. No handover cliff after launch.
MONTH TO MONTH, NO LOCK-IN
Shopify development retainers
A named senior team in your timezone, with agreed response times and a roadmap reviewed every month. Fixed monthly blocks of hours, month to month, with no long lock-in.
IN SHORT
- A retainer is a fixed monthly block of senior development hours, sized against your roadmap rather than guessed at.
- Month to month, with no notice period designed to keep you past the point of usefulness.
- Unused hours roll into the next cycle — and if they keep rolling, we reduce the block rather than bill for idle capacity.
- Urgent issues have a separate path: a broken checkout does not wait for the next planning cycle.
- The team is named, senior and in your timezone, and it is the team that knows your store.
What you are actually buying
Not hours. Hours are how it is measured, not what it is for. What a retainer buys you is a team that already knows why your store is built the way it is — which is the difference between a change taking two hours and taking two days.
Every agency relationship has a cost of context. Project-by-project work pays that cost repeatedly: someone reads the codebase, works out why that integration is shaped oddly, rediscovers the thing that broke last time. A retainer pays it once.
That is also why we resist handing clients to a separate support team after launch. The handover saves the agency money and costs the client everything the project team knew.
How it runs
Five stages, then the last two repeat monthly.
- 01
Audit what exists
If we did not build the store, we spend the first days reading the theme, apps and integrations. Changing code you have not understood is how agencies break things in week two.
- 02
Size the block
Hours per month set against the actual roadmap. Launch quarters need more, quiet quarters less, and we would rather adjust than have you paying for capacity you are not using.
- 03
Plan each cycle
At the start of the month we agree the split: improvements, campaign work, fixes, technical debt. Written down, visible to both sides.
- 04
Work in the open
Everything lands on a staging theme with preview links as it goes, so you are seeing progress continuously rather than at a month-end reveal.
- 05
Review and re-plan
Monthly review against the numbers: what shipped, what moved, what carried over, what changed in priority. That conversation sets the next cycle.
What the hours go to
- Improvements against the roadmap — the work that moves numbers
- Campaign and launch support, including landing pages
- Bug fixes and the things that break when apps or themes update
- Technical debt and maintenance, budgeted rather than deferred indefinitely
- App audits and performance work as the store accumulates
- Advice — reviewing an app before you buy it, or a plan before you commit
That last one is underrated. A twenty-minute conversation about whether an app is a good idea has saved clients more money than most of the code we have written for them.
How we size it honestly
The rolling-hours test
If hours roll over one month, that is normal. If they roll over three months running, the block is too big and we will say so and reduce it.
Agencies are not supposed to volunteer this, because a retainer nobody uses is the most profitable kind. But a client paying for capacity they do not need eventually notices, and when they do they do not just reduce it — they leave.
The reverse matters too: if we are consistently over, we will tell you the block is undersized rather than quietly cutting corners to fit inside it.
What is different about ours
Roadmap over queue
Each cycle allocates deliberately across improvements, campaigns and debt, with urgent work interrupting rather than defining it.
Hours roll over
Unused scope carries into the next cycle. It is your budget, not our margin.
Timezone overlap
Teams in the US, UK and Australia, so you are working with people in your working day.
Brands on retainer
Wonderskin
Grays
Wonderskin runs ongoing landing page production and maintenance. Grays we migrated, relaunched and have maintained since. For brands with no in-house ecommerce team, the retainer extends into full store management.
Retainer questions
What is included in a Shopify retainer?
A fixed monthly block of senior development hours covering improvements, fixes, campaign work and the roadmap review — scoped with you at the start of each cycle.
Is there a minimum contract?
No. Retainers run month to month.
How many hours should our retainer be?
It depends on how much the store changes. A stable store on maintenance needs far less than one running weekly campaigns and an active optimization programme. We size it against your roadmap and adjust it — a retainer that consistently rolls hours over is sized wrong.
What if we have an urgent issue?
Urgent issues have their own path and interrupt the cycle rather than queuing behind planned work. A broken checkout is not a ticket that waits for the next planning meeting.
Can we pause a retainer?
Yes. Month to month means month to month. Brands pause around quiet periods and come back for a launch, which is a perfectly sensible way to use it.
Related
Campaign & Landing Pages
Ongoing landing page production for brands shipping campaigns faster than a project cycle allows.
Maintenance & Theme Health
App audits, theme updates and the unglamorous work that keeps a store fast after launch.
Full Store Management
For brands without an in-house ecommerce team, we run the store day to day.
NEXT STEP
Month-to-month retainers
Fixed monthly blocks of senior hours, no long lock-in. The people who built your store are the people who keep improving it.