Feature-Enhancement Retainers
A monthly block of development capacity spent on small new features and improvements rather than fixes, so an application keeps growing in useful ways without a separate project for every idea.
What a Feature-Enhancement Retainer Is
This is different from a maintenance contract, which exists to keep an application working as it already does. A feature-enhancement retainer exists to keep adding to it: a new report, a smoother workflow, an integration the business has been putting off because it never felt big enough to justify its own project.
How Requests Turn Into Work
A Running Backlog
Ideas and requests are logged as they come up instead of being remembered until the next conversation.
Sized Before They're Started
Each item is estimated against the available monthly capacity before work begins, so priorities are chosen with real numbers, not guesses.
Reviewed and Reprioritised Monthly
The order of the backlog is revisited each month, since what matters most can change as the business does.
What Fits in a Retainer vs a Separate Project
A retainer suits steady, moderate-sized improvements: a new filter on a report, an added notification, a small workflow change. A feature large enough to need its own design, testing plan and rollout, such as a new customer-facing module, is usually better scoped as its own project so it is not competing with everything else in the backlog.
Keeping a Roadmap Moving Without a Full-Time Team
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from a maintenance contract?
Maintenance keeps existing functionality working; a retainer builds new functionality. Many businesses run both together, with maintenance handling anything that breaks and the retainer handling anything new.
What decides how many features fit in a month?
The size of the reserved capacity and how large each requested item is. A retainer sized for a handful of small changes will not also absorb a large new module in the same period.
What decides the cost of a retainer?
The amount of monthly capacity you reserve. A larger retainer moves more of the backlog each month; a smaller one moves it more slowly.
Can requests change from month to month?
Yes. The backlog is reprioritised each month, so this month's most useful change does not have to match what mattered three months ago.
Do you need our existing codebase and design files?
Yes, along with access to whatever design or specification material already exists, so new features are built consistently with what is already there.
Who owns the features once they're built?
You do. Everything built under the retainer becomes part of your application, in your repository, with no separate licence required to keep using it.
What happens to unused capacity in a quiet month?
This is agreed upfront as part of how the retainer is structured, since practices differ on whether unused time carries forward or resets.
Tell us what you need.
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