Retainer

What people use a retainer for

• Build-versus-buy calls on AI tooling. Whether your warehouse vendor's AI assistant is the right bet, or whether it ties your metric definitions to one platform you may not use forever.
• Vendor negotiations. Reading a renewal against your actual usage, and escalating when the bill is the vendor's fault rather than yours.
• Org design. Standing up your first governance and MLOps functions, with role ladders, review standards, and on-call rituals.
• Executive readouts. Turning platform work into numbers a board or a CFO reads: unit economics, cost per workload, and the return on AI spend.
• Architecture review. A second pair of eyes on a design before it becomes expensive to change.

How it works

We agree on a standing slot each month and a channel for everything in between. You send the design doc, the vendor proposal, or the question the night before, and I read it properly and come back with a written view. When a decision cannot wait for the standing slot, we get on a call.

A retainer is advice, not delivery. If a conversation turns into something that needs building, we scope it as a Build.