I run an app agency, and over time we ran into a lot of pain managing client retainers.<p>We have 15+ clients on different setups (some hourly, some fixed monthly) and were juggling Slack, ClickUp, Toggl, Stripe, and email. It became a mess to track hours, assign tasks, and keep clients updated without spending way too much time on manual updates.<p>We ended up building an internal tool to handle retainer tracking, team assignments, and automated client updates. It saved us a lot of time and improved communication and built trust.<p>Now I’m wondering if this is just our problem or something others struggle with too.<p>Would love to hear:
• How do you manage retainers or ongoing client work?
• What’s been your biggest headache?
• Have you found tools that work well, or are you hacking it together with multiple tools?<p>For context, I set up a public version at retainkit.io<p>Would love to hear your mind even if you are a freelancer!<p>Not trying to pitch, just curious if it’s useful beyond our agency.<p>Thanks!
I use linear for this and invite the clients as a guest. It has project updates built in and other neat things. It, however, doesn't have billing built in -- that's done differently in our case (we bill by half-day, so if someone even so much as answers an email, it gets billed as half a day of work).