Two ways to work with us. Both of them priced before we start.
Either we build something to a fixed fee against agreed milestones, and anything you add arrives as a written change order — or we run a named stack for a flat monthly fee, with one scoped item included each month. Most engagements open with a $9,500 assessment, which produces a plan you keep whether or not you continue.
- Systems and data inventory across your entities
- Where the numbers disagree, and why
- Your owner's-questions list, written down
- A costed plan you keep — with us or anyone else
- No obligation to continue
- Scope, price, and milestones agreed before work starts
- Billed per milestone, on acceptance
- New requests priced as change orders, never absorbed silently
- You own the code outright at handover
- Recent: a two-sided listings platform at $52.5k across seven milestones
- Recent: a clinical program builder at $15k
- We name the systems we cover, in writing
- Monitoring, fixes, updates, vendor escalations
- One scoped item per month, sized by tier
- Anything outside the named list: $2,500/day, one-day minimum
- Cancel on 30 days' notice
What the monthly fee covers.
Why the included item costs less than a day of out-of-scope work. Planned work on a stack we already maintain is genuinely cheaper for us to deliver than an unplanned interrupt. The day rate prices the interruption, not the hour.
Unused months don't roll over. The fee buys a healthy stack; the included item is additive. In a quiet month you still got the thing you were paying for. Banking items would also make our capacity impossible to plan, which is how retainers start feeling unfair in both directions.
Most engagements start the same way.
Assessment is the usual entry point. From there, most clients move to Build for a defined project at a fixed fee, milestone by milestone, or to Managed for an ongoing named stack at a flat monthly fee. Either can also start cold, without an assessment first, if you already know what you need.
All engagements are covered by our standard Master Service Agreement. Pricing is firm — what keeps it that way is that it's genuinely fair for the work. The math is below.
The split-vendor comparison.
The easiest way to see what vendor consolidation is worth is to price out what it costs to source the same functions across the specialists you'd otherwise hire one by one. Here's the current-market comparison for a client with real operational complexity — the kind of client who ends up managing a fleet of vendors instead of one firm.
| Function | Typical vendor | Monthly equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot / CRM admin & RevOps | Certified partner agency | $8k–$15k1 |
| Custom BI dashboards & hosting | Dev shop or freelance team | $10k–$20k2 |
| Fractional CTO | Solo fractional | $10k–$15k3 |
| Fractional COO / ops strategist | Solo fractional | $8k–$12k4 |
| Managed IT / on-call support | Regional MSP | $3k–$6k5 |
| Web dev / integrations | Agency project fees, amortized | $5k–$10k6 |
| Vendor evaluation & procurement | Boutique consultant | $5k–$10k7 |
| Executive documentation & comms | Fractional chief of staff | $3k–$5k8 |
| Split-vendor total (midpoint) | ~$70k/mo | |
A full engagement usually spans the whole ladder, not one line of it: an Assessment finds the work, a Build does it, and Managed keeps it running afterward. The monthly fee alone isn't a stand-in for all eight functions above — it's what keeps the ones you've already built running.
- AI where it matters. Configuration, documentation, and dashboard work is force-multiplied by modern tooling. Agency-grade output at two-person speed.
- Pattern recognition across industries. The same problem recurs in title, survey, death care, construction, and clinical work: a record that has to survive being questioned. We are not learning that problem on your dime.
- Context compounds. Once we've run your stack for a while, we know your business. A vendor you replaced starts from zero; we build on what's already there.
Where the comparison numbers come from.
The split-vendor comparison uses 2026 market-rate ranges drawn from published pricing guides, benchmark reports, and MSP/fractional-leadership research across North America. Ranges reflect what a mid-market operationally-complex client would pay to source each function from a qualified specialist. Source numbers match the superscripts in the comparison table.
- HubSpot / CRM admin & RevOps — $8k–$15k/mo
Certified HubSpot partner agency retainers for active portal administration, RevOps architecture, and workflow management. Range consistent with industry-standard implementation-plus-retainer pricing for mid-market HubSpot customers.
HubSpot Solutions Partner directory pricing benchmarks, 2026. Blended from certified partner public rate cards.
- Custom BI dashboards & hosting — $10k–$20k/mo
Ongoing dev-shop or freelance-team retainers for custom BI builds (Next.js, React, data pipeline, hosting). Reflects typical full-stack team rates for active dashboard iteration plus infrastructure management.
US dev agency retainer benchmarks, 2026; cross-referenced with Pertama Partners AI/BI implementation cost ranges.
- Fractional CTO — $10k–$15k/mo
Mid-to-upper range for ongoing fractional CTO retainers for growth-stage and mid-market companies, reflecting 2–3 days per week of senior technical leadership.
Fractional CTO Cost & Rates 2026 Complete Pricing Guide (fractionalctoexperts.com); Kompella Technologies 2026 pricing guide; Emizentech fractional CTO rates 2026.
- Fractional COO / ops strategist — $8k–$12k/mo
Typical ongoing retainer range for solo fractional COO/ops leadership at mid-market scale. Aligned with fractional-executive ranges across adjacent functions (CFO, CTO) in operations-heavy industries.
Cross-referenced from Madras Accountancy Fractional CFO Rates by Industry 2026 (construction vertical) and fractional-executive pricing guides.
- Managed IT / on-call support — $3k–$6k/mo
Regional MSP pricing for a ~20–30 user mid-market client at $100–$200 per user per month for comprehensive managed services including monitoring, helpdesk, and security.
Datapath Managed IT Services Pricing Guide 2026; Solutionbuilders Ultimate 2026 Guide to Managed IT Services Pricing; Corsica Technologies 2026 pricing benchmarks.
- Web dev / integrations — $5k–$10k/mo
Amortized agency project fees for website rebuilds, integration builds, and ongoing web development work, spread over typical 6–12 month engagement cycles.
US digital agency project-fee benchmarks, 2026. Derived from public agency rate cards for mid-market clients.
- Vendor evaluation & procurement — $5k–$10k/mo
Boutique consulting fees for ongoing vendor evaluation, procurement support, and tool selection across software and hardware stacks typical in operationally-complex mid-market businesses.
Boutique consulting retainer benchmarks; cross-referenced from MSP value-based pricing examples in DeskDay 2026 MSP pricing guide.
- Executive documentation & comms — $3k–$5k/mo
Fractional chief of staff or executive-ghostwriter monthly retainer range for ongoing leadership documentation, briefings, and stakeholder communications at mid-market scale.
Fractional chief-of-staff market benchmarks, 2026.
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