Stop giving hours away and walking into renewals unprepared.
Every "one small thing" adds up. A client asks for a quick analysis. You say yes—relationship first, scope second. The week you logged 15 hours. By month-end, you're 12 hours over. No record of it. At renewal, you've got no evidence of the over-delivery.
This happens across all your clients. Hours slip away. Scope expands quietly. Renewals become a guess instead of a conversation.
The result: You're working at full-time hours for part-time pay.
Across 4 clients: $28K–$48K per year of invisible friction. That's scope creep, unprepared renewals, and Notion workarounds that shouldn't exist.
Scope tracking. Engagement health. Renewal evidence. All in one place.
Your signed proposal becomes your live engagement. Out-of-scope hours flagged instantly. At 80% of your ceiling, you know it's time to have a conversation.
Dashboard shows every engagement. Green, yellow, or red status based on scope, hours, and recency. Monday morning: which two clients need your attention today?
One button generates your renewal brief. Hours delivered, scope expanded, check-in history. Walk in prepared, not guessing.
"Scope creep turns your perfectly planned 10-hour project into a 30-hour nightmare."
Fractional CMO MasterMind
"My CRM situation is embarrassing."
Alex Jukes, Fractional CTO
"Scope creep and conflicting demands ranked top challenges among 250+ fractional executives."
FRAK Industry Report, 2024
Here's why none of them are built for your job:
Notion templates
Free and flexible, but they require 5–10 hrs/week of maintenance. No alerts. No renewal brief generation. No way to know which clients are sliding toward unbilled work.
General CRM (HoneyBook, Bonsai, Monday)
Built for agencies doing hourly/project work. They don't track scope against a ceiling. They don't help you prepare renewal conversations with evidence.
Fractional job boards (Shiny, Connectd, GigX)
They help you find clients. They don't help you manage the clients you have or prepare for renewals.
Retainer solves the gap: scope tracking + hours ceilings + renewal evidence, built specifically for execs managing 3–8 simultaneous retainer clients.
No. Retainer is burst-friendly. Log hours end-of-day from memory. A 5-minute Slack, 40-minute call, 2-hour deck. No timers, no friction. Real work is bursty; software should match that.
No. Retainer is for engagement management and visibility. We integrate with Ignition or you can export your data and use whatever you like. We focus on scope and renewals, not billing.
You can, but we're built for execs managing 3–8 simultaneous clients. If you've got 1–2, Notion works fine. If you're growing toward 3–4, now's the time to build a proper practice.
You keep it. CSV export. Everything you logged stays yours. We don't lock you in. You own your data, period.
Not in the founding member version. We're building solo-exec features first. If team management becomes a request from founding members, we'll add it.
We'll ship the core product within 90 days. If we don't ship, you get your money back. No excuses, no delays. We're committing to a timeline, not guessing.
Join fractional executives who are tired of scope creep, unprepared renewals, and Notion workarounds.
Join the founding members