Flat setup fee and you own the thing, or a monthly fee and you never open it?

Flat fee, and I say that as someone who hates recurring charges on principle. But your own paragraph names the risk and I don't think buyers price it. If the only person who understood the build is gone, the flat fee bought you an asset you can't maintain. So flat fee plus a written map, and I'd want that map to be readable by a person who has never seen the platform.

What does "the account is in your name" mean in practice? Whose credit card, whose email, and can the consultant still get in afterward?

Monthly for me and it's because of exactly the drift thatch describes. I paid flat, it worked well for about three months, then I switched from cold calling to mail and the whole intake was pointed at the wrong place. Nothing was broken technically. The system was answering a question I no longer asked. It sat wrong for five weeks before I admitted I couldn't fix it myself.

This is the thing I'd have been embarrassed to ask out loud. What is in a monthly fee? Is it a set number of hours, is it unlimited small requests, is it just being on call? Because $400 a month for "we watch it" and $400 a month for four hours of changes are completely different purchases and I wouldn't know which one I'd bought.

Monthly. Same reason I'd use a property manager. I don't want a second job and a CRM I have to maintain is a second job with worse hours.

Neither, at my stage. I'm still working out what deal one costs and adding either number to that sheet makes it worse. A sheet with a date column does what I need for now. I'd rather be the guy who bought it too late than windlass in the other thread.

@marlow the property manager comparison doesn't hold for me. A manager collects rent whether you look or not. A CRM only works if the humans in your shop use it, and nobody outside your shop can make them. Flat build, then pay a VA $16 an hour to actually live in it and fix small stuff. That's cheaper than a retainer and the VA is on my calls anyway.

Price it per deal or you'll argue about this forever. $400 a month is $4,800 a year. If my average net on a deal is $14,000, the retainer pays for itself if it saves me one deal every three years, which is a low bar. If I'm netting $4,000 on assignments and doing eight a year, the same retainer is 15 percent of my income and I'd never sign it. The right answer moves with deal size, so both camps in this thread are probably right about their own numbers.

The question I'd want answered before voting: on the monthly option, what happens the month I stop paying? Does the system keep running, do I keep the contact history, does the phone number come with me. If stopping means losing three years of notes then the monthly fee isn't a service fee, it's rent on my own records, and I'd price it completely differently.

Middle option, and I'd put the tune-up on the calendar the day I sign so I'm not the half who never books it. Two hours in April, two in October.

None of it, for what I do. I hold land and I might have four real conversations a quarter. But I'll say the shape of the problem is different for land, because my follow-up runs on a two year clock and no sequence built for a 10 day wholesale window fits that at all. If somebody built me a system that remembered to call a seller in 18 months I'd pay flat for it happily.

I did monthly for seven months and the response time on requests averaged five days. Five days on a broken form is a month of leads going nowhere. Went flat with the next person, made him record video of every automation while he built it, and I've fixed three things myself since. @keystone your drift happened to me too, but I'd rather learn it and be slow than wait on someone.

Reading this whole thread, the split isn't really about money. It's about how often your lead sources change. Stable mail program for three years, buy flat. Testing a new channel every quarter, buy the retainer, because the build is never finished.

Voting flat. @thatch what's your churn on the monthly clients, and how many of them stay past a year? That number would tell me more than either pitch.

@sextant reframing it per deal moved me. At my volume the retainer is absurd, so flat plus @verity's calendared tune-up is where I land, assuming @juniper's ownership question gets a clean answer in writing before any money moves.