Website Support
That Moves With You
Ongoing Support Retainer Overview
Purpose of the Ongoing Support Retainer
Websites don't stop needing care once they launch.
As your website evolves, through content changes, marketing campaigns, software updates, compliance requirements, and shifts in how people use it, ongoing support becomes essential to keep things running smoothly and aligned with your goals.
Sland's Ongoing Support Retainer exists to provide collaborative, proactive, and predictable support after launch. Rather than responding only when something breaks or feels urgent, retainers allow us to plan work intentionally, maintain continuity, and address issues before they become emergencies.
Preferred Rate:
Clients on an ongoing support retainer receive a discounted hourly rate of $125 CAD/hour and a structured, predictable approach to ongoing website support.
At its core, a retainer helps shift website support from:
Without
Reactive
Responding to issues as they arise
Without
Urgent
Last-minute requests and emergencies
Without
Unpredictable
Variable costs and timelines
Without
Ad-hoc
One-off support with no continuity
With
Proactive
Planning work before issues arise
With
Planned
Scheduled updates and improvements
With
Predictable
Stable costs and timelines
With
Strategic
Ongoing partnership with context
The Biggest Benefit: Perhaps one of the biggest benefits to an Ongoing Support Retainer through Sland is our regularly scheduled quarterly touch-point meetings. This is where we review your last quarter, discuss plans for your upcoming quarter, go over any website pain points & training gaps, as well as any other updates and questions. These regular meetings will give us broader context to better understand and support your website needs holistically, and collaboratively plan our work together.
While an ongoing support retainer is not a warranty or unlimited support, it is rather a strategic partnership designed to maintain and augment your website to achieve your business goals, while minimizing costly reactive or urgent work in a predictable and collaborative cadence.
How Ongoing Support Retainers Work with Sland Studios
An ongoing support retainer defines the ongoing working rhythm between your team and Sland after launch. Through regular check-ins, planned work, and ongoing maintenance, it ensures website updates, improvements, and compliance requirements are addressed with continuity and foresight, rather than reactively.
What's Included Operationally
Quarterly Strategic Check-ins
We schedule regular check-ins each quarter to review how things have been going and plan ahead. These meetings help us understand what's coming up for your organization, review priorities, and identify upcoming work before it becomes urgent. Additional training sessions or walkthroughs can be scheduled as needed to keep your team up to speed.
Time spent in these meetings is counted toward your retainer hours.
Planned, Proactive Website Work
Retainers allow us to flag, plan, and schedule website work in advance. This includes ongoing improvements, refinements, and maintenance tasks that are best handled deliberately rather than at the last minute. Known issues can be addressed early, reducing the likelihood of emergencies.
Ongoing Context & Continuity
Because we're working with you consistently, your website's history, priorities, and technical context are carried forward over time. This allows us to approach solutions more holistically and move work forward more efficiently, without needing to rediscover context and anticipate potential pain points or offer strategic solutions.
Platform Upgrades (as required)
To keep your team equipped with the latest versions of technology powering your website, sometimes there is maintenance work to facilitate such upgrades. We work together to explain, prioritize, and plan these larger structural updates to minimize disruption and keep your organization running smoothly.
Monthly PCI Compliance Maintenance (Where Applicable)
For websites that process payments or donations, ongoing PCI compliance requires regular maintenance. As part of an active support retainer, we perform monthly platform and plugin updates required to help maintain PCI compliance, monitor for known risk areas, and address compatibility issues as they arise.
PCI compliance is an ongoing responsibility, not a one-time setup. Without a retainer, this monthly maintenance is not included and would be handled as billable, ad-hoc support.
Reduction in Emergency Requests
Most website issues arise during uncoordinated high-traffic events or when updates conflict with other components. Regular check-ins and proactive planning help surface these moments in advance, allowing them to be navigated smoothly and significantly reducing the likelihood of emergency requests.
Retainer Pricing & Rates
Our retainer pricing is designed to balance predictable budgeting with intentional, well-planned support. By working with you on an ongoing basis, we maintain context around your business, operations, and marketing needs, allowing us to prioritize and schedule work thoughtfully rather than responding only to ad-hoc or emergency requests. This approach supports better outcomes, more efficient use of time, and fewer last-minute surprises for everyone involved.
Retainer Partner Rate: $125 CAD/hr
Retainers are committed on an annual term and designed to support different levels of ongoing website activity, Versus 'full rate' of $150 CAD/hr for ad-hoc support per Support SLA.
Essential Support Plan
3 hours / month (36 hours / year)
Best suited for websites with light but consistent support needs. This plan typically covers quarterly check-ins, small updates, PCI-related maintenance (where applicable), and limited planned refinements to keep the site running smoothly.
Growth Plan
6 hours / month (72 hours / year)
Designed for active websites with regular updates and evolving needs. In addition to ongoing maintenance and compliance-related work, this plan allows room for moderate website augmentations, such as custom coding, feature enhancements, or larger update projects that benefit from advance planning.
Enterprise Plan
12 hours / month (144 hours / year)
Intended for business-critical or highly active websites that require frequent updates and deeper involvement. Alongside ongoing maintenance and compliance support, this plan supports larger-scale website augmentations, including custom development, new features, and more substantial update initiatives, all planned and delivered over time.
Why Retainer Pricing Is Different
Retainers are not discounted simply for volume. The reduced rate reflects:
- Reserved and predictable capacity
- Reduced administrative overhead (fewer quotes and approvals)
- Proactive planning instead of last-minute requests
- Better continuity and long-term efficiency
Depending on the plan selected, retainers can result in approximately $900–$3,600 in annual savings compared to standard hourly support.
How Retainer Hours Are Consumed
A retainer provides a set number of consumable hours per year. These hours are shared across all ongoing support activity, including:
- Quarterly strategic check-ins and planning meetings
- Required monthly compliance-related maintenance (such as PCI updates, where applicable)
- Website maintenance, refinements, and planned updates
- Approved feature work or enhancements
Important: Because meetings and compliance work are part of maintaining a healthy, secure website, they naturally consume a portion of your annual hours. The remaining balance is then available for hands-on website work, such as content updates, improvements, or new features.
For this reason, it's important to consider your expected update cadence when selecting a retainer plan. For example, the lowest retainer tier may leave limited hours available for substantial update work once meetings and required maintenance are accounted for.
Why You Might Need an Ongoing Support Retainer
While you are not required to sign up for a support retainer through Sland, having an ongoing maintenance and support strategy is an industry recommendation and best practice. Consider the analogy of regular oil changes and vehicle inspections; these will save you more costly and urgent fixes down the road.
Best practice: As a website becomes more active, visible, or business-critical, having structured, ongoing support becomes increasingly valuable.
An ongoing support retainer is a good fit if any of the following apply:
- Your website is considered Business Critical to your organizations' operations
- Your website is updated regularly, whether through content updates, new features, or refinements
- You run campaigns, events, or seasonal initiatives that drive traffic spikes
- Your website processes payments, donations, or subscriptions and needs to meet PCI requirements through regular monthly updates
- You want predictable support costs instead of one-off invoices
- You prefer planned improvements over reactive fixes
- You value continuity, collaboration, and someone who has your back to strategize on all things web
How a Retainer Helps in Practice
With a retainer in place, we're able to:
- Plan work intentionally based on upcoming needs and priorities
- Address known issues before they escalate into emergencies
- Coordinate larger updates or augmentations over time instead of rushing them
- Reduce downtime risk during busy or high-visibility periods
- Spend less time quoting and more time executing
When a Retainer May Not Be Necessary
A retainer may not be required if:
- Your website is largely static and rarely changes
- Your website is more of an informational hub or brochure style page, and not considered Business Critical
- You're comfortable engaging support on an ad-hoc basis and understand the risk of potential emergency updates
- You don't require regular maintenance, compliance updates, or ongoing improvements
In these cases, Sland can still provide support as needed, though work will be handled reactively and subject to availability, quoting, and standard response timelines.
What You Can Expect From Your Monthly Retainer
Your monthly retainer includes a combination of hands-on support time and operational maintenance that our team facilitates behind the scenes to keep your site stable, secure, and compliant. Some of this work, such as PCI compliance monitoring and platform-level updates, is pre-scheduled and occurs every month, whether or not a support request is submitted. While these tasks consume a portion of your monthly hours, they provide meaningful value by reducing risk, preventing issues, and minimizing the likelihood of emergency situations later on.
Because this operational work is built into every plan, the number of remaining hours available for active support, feature requests, and consultation is often less than the headline monthly total. For organizations that anticipate ongoing requests or want flexibility throughout the year, starting with a higher plan can help ensure sufficient time is available when needed.
Actual Hours Available
We include 1–2 hours per month of pre-scheduled operational work (such as PCI compliance and platform updates). The remaining time is available for active support, feature requests, enhancements, and consultation.
Essential Support Plan
Retainer total hours
36 hrs / year (3 hrs / month) total
Actual usable hours remaining
8-20 hrs for the year
(0.5 - 1.5hrs / month)
Remaining Usable Hours
Annual
Monthly
• ~1–2 hrs used for monthly maintenance efforts
• ~1 hr used each quarter for strategic meetings (1 Sland team member)
Best suited for largely self-managed sites with infrequent changes and minimal ongoing requests to require Sland's assistance or consultation.
Growth Plan
Retainer total hours
72 hrs / year (6 hrs / month) total
Actual usable hours remaining
40-56 hrs for the year
(3 - 4.5hrs / month)
Remaining Usable Hours
Annual
Monthly
• ~1–2 hrs used for monthly maintenance efforts
• ~1–2 hrs used each quarter for strategic meetings (1-2 Sland team members)
Provides some headroom for requests, small enhancements, and ongoing collaboration throughout the year.
Enterprise Plan
Retainer total hours
144 hrs / year (12 hrs / month) total
Actual usable hours remaining
108-128 hrs for the year
(9 - 10.5hrs / month)
Remaining Usable Hours
Annual
Monthly
• ~1–2 hrs used for monthly maintenance efforts
• ~1–3 hrs used each quarter for strategic meetings (1-3 Sland team members)
Supports frequent updates, custom development, and larger initiatives without needing to closely track hours month to month.
Our Recommendation: Growth Plan
For most MaestroPress clients, the Growth Plan provides the best balance of preventative maintenance and meaningful support time. After accounting for required operational work, this plan still leaves room for ongoing updates, feature enhancements, and consultation throughout the year. It offers the flexibility to plan improvements proactively—without immediately running up against monthly limits.
Support Scenarios
Detailed examples of how support requests are handled in general (including emergencies, billing, and response times) are outlined separately in our Support Service Level Agreement (SLA) document.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the ongoing support retainer relate to website hosting?
Website hosting covers the infrastructure your site runs on, including uptime, server monitoring, and baseline maintenance.
An ongoing support retainer covers ongoing website support, including planning, updates, improvements, compliance-related maintenance, and coordination.
A required update to server software may, for instance, require testing, configuration, and quality assurance to facilitate which would be considered maintenance, however, we'd flag this as early as possible in our regular meetings for your consideration.
What's not included in an ongoing support retainer?
Retainers are intentionally scoped. They do not include:
- Full website redesigns or rebuilds that would exceed your annual hours
- Large net-new features beyond what your plan can feasibly accommodate
- Third-party software, licensing, or subscription costs
- Unlimited consultation or advisory services
- Work outside normal support boundaries unless planned in advance
These items can be quoted and scheduled separately if needed.
How does PCI compliance fit into an ongoing support retainer?
PCI compliance is the client's responsibility.
For websites that process payments or donations, a support retainer allows Sland to perform the regular monthly updates and maintenance required to help maintain PCI compliance.
Sland works with Cloudways as our hosting partner. Cloudways maintains PCI-compliant standards on their hosting standards, per their corporate policy. For more information, click to learn more about Cloudways' PCI policies.
Without a retainer, PCI-related maintenance is not included and would be handled as billable, ad-hoc support, and would need to be requested specifically.
Hosting alone does not maintain PCI compliance; for more info, check out our blog article.
What happens if there's an emergency?
Emergencies are handled as quickly as possible, not instantly.
However, because we have ongoing context around your website, investigation and resolution can often move more efficiently. Emergency work still consumes retainer hours and may involve emergency rates if handled outside standard response windows.
Planning and regular check-ins significantly reduce the likelihood of emergency situations over time.
What if I don't want to sign up for an ongoing support retainer?
That's completely okay. Clients without a retainer:
- Can still submit support requests
- Are supported on a request-by-request basis
- May experience longer response or turnaround times during busy periods
- Will typically receive a quote before work begins
- May be subject to emergency or after-hours rates if applicable
- Quote & resolution billables may require additional billable investigation time to gain context.
A retainer provides predictability and continuity, but it is optional.
Can I change or cancel my retainer later?
Ongoing support retainers are committed on an annual term to support proper planning and resourcing.
During the term:
- You may move between retainer plans (for example, from Essential to Growth) as needs change when terms expire
- Plan changes maintain the same hourly rate
At the end of the term, we'll review your usage and needs together and confirm renewal, changes, or next steps.
Note: 30 days notice required ahead of annual term adjustment at end of term.
How is this different from non-retainer support?
Retainer clients benefit from:
- Proactive planning instead of reactive support
- Ongoing context and continuity, allowing for efficiency in cost/turnaround time
- Fewer quoting steps for related or planned work
- More flexibility for questions and small adjustments
Non-retainer clients are supported as requests come in, with work scoped, quoted, and scheduled individually.
How are non-billable support requests handled with a retainer?
Support requests generally consume retainer hours.
In many cases, Sland needs to review context, confirm expected behaviour, or investigate the cause of an issue before determining next steps. That investigative effort is part of providing responsible support and is typically considered billable time.
Non-billable support is limited to a small set of situations, such as:
- A quick question that can be answered without investigation, internal consultation, or hands-on review
- A simple clarification that does not require changes, testing, or analysis
If a request requires investigation, internal discussion, or implementation work, it will generally be considered billable and consume retainer hours.
How is warranty support handled with a retainer?
Warranty support applies only in limited circumstances and for a defined period following launch of a website or feature.
If a recently implemented feature, update, or custom code is clearly not functioning as intended or was not completed to the agreed specification, Sland will address the issue as warranty (non-billable) work where appropriate.
However, due to the evolving nature of websites, including software updates, third-party changes, and client-made edits, most requests are considered billable website maintenance.
As a general guideline:
- Features or functionality launched more than six months prior are considered completed scope
- Updates, fixes, or changes to existing features beyond that point are not considered warranty work
If there's ever uncertainty around whether an issue falls under warranty, we'll review it and communicate our assessment clearly before proceeding.