What a managed AI retainer actually does each month
The failure mode of retainers
Most monthly AI retainers are insurance you hope you never use. You pay, nothing visibly happens, and after four months you cannot answer the only question that matters: what did I get for that. So you cancel, and the automations quietly rot until one breaks for good.
The problem is not the price. It is that the retainer bought maintenance, and maintenance is invisible right up until it fails.
One visible improvement, every month
Every retainer we run bundles one visible change a month. A new automation, a faster one, a report that used to take a person an hour now landing in your inbox on its own. Something you can point at. That is the difference between paying to keep the lights on and paying to keep getting better.
It is also the honest defense against churn. If you can see the thing improve every month, you do not have to take reliability on faith.
And a report that proves it
The second half is an automated what-your-AI-did report. Runs completed, hours saved, anything that broke and how fast it was caught. It writes itself, because the same logging that catches failures also counts the wins.
You own the accounts and the keys the whole time, and token costs pass through at cost. The retainer buys attention and improvement, not a markup on the model. Every number is on the pricing page.
The audit answers this for your business
Two weeks, $2,500 flat ($1,000 for the first three clients), and you get the map of your own automatable work with dollars on it.