We don't take retainers under three months. Here's why.

The most common request from new clients is a one-month trial. The reasoning is usually the same: "We want to see if this works before committing."

It's a fair instinct. It's also why we don't offer it.

A one-month retainer doesn't give you a real picture of whether something is working. It gives you a picture of week one, when nothing is set up yet, plus week four, when things have just started running. The middle two weeks are spent in onboarding, audit, account access, and getting platforms aligned.

Nobody is happy with a one-month retainer. The client thinks they paid for setup and got nothing useful. The agency had four weeks to deliver months of work. Both sides walk away frustrated.

What three months actually buys you

The first month is setup. We audit what exists, build the strategy, get accounts and tracking in order, and define the content or campaign system. Most of what we do in month one is invisible from the outside.

The second month is execution. Content goes live, ads are running, tracking is producing real data. Things start to look like progress. But the data set is still small.

The third month is when things start to mean something. Patterns emerge. We can tell what's working, what isn't, what to scale, what to cut. Decisions made in month three are based on real evidence, not assumptions.

A retainer that ends at month two ends right before the work starts paying off. We've watched this happen often enough that we stopped offering the option.

What this means for new clients

If you want to test working with us before committing to a longer engagement, the better option is a one-off project. Branding, a website build, a launch campaign. Defined scope, defined deliverable, defined end date.

If the project goes well, we can talk about an ongoing retainer afterwards. If it doesn't, you've still walked away with something usable.

Retainers are for ongoing work where consistency is the entire point. Three months is the minimum at which "ongoing" becomes a real word.

The shorter version

A one-month retainer isn't a test. It's an interruption. We'd rather not waste your money or our time pretending otherwise.

If three months feels like too much, the conversation we should be having isn't about retainer length. It's about whether ongoing marketing is what you actually need right now.