If you’ve ever felt like your agency’s billing is a mystery or that you’re paying for things you don’t use (or worse, not getting what you actually need), it’s usually because the commercial model is wrong.
At Make Do, one of the first things we do is help a prospect self-select the right way to work with us. It’s not one-size-fits-all. A business launching a new product needs something very different from an industrial giant whose internal portal cannot go offline for even ten minutes.
Here is how we break down the three main ways to partner with a professional WordPress agency.
1. The Project Model (Fixed Deliverables)
Best for: When you have a clear start, a clear middle, and a clear end.
Projects that include custom WordPress development are built around a specific scope of work with a fixed budget. This makes sense for things like a complete site rebuild, a new CRM integration, or a specific feature launch.
- The Pros: Budget certainty and a defined deadline.
- The Cons: It’s rigid. If your business requirements change halfway through, you’re looking at “Change Requests” and budget creep.
- The Mistake to Avoid: Thinking a project “finishes” the work. A project builds the asset; it doesn’t look after it once it’s live.
2. The Retainer Model (Flexible Capacity)
Best for: Ongoing growth and “continual improvement.”
A retainer is essentially buying a block of our time every month. It’s for businesses that want a “technical co-pilot” to tweak, test, and evolve their site constantly and supply WordPress maintenance services.
- The Pros: You get priority access to our team. It’s agile—we can pivot from fixing a bug on Monday to building a new landing page on Thursday without a new contract.
- The Cons: If you don’t have a roadmap or a backlog of tasks, you aren’t getting the full value of the time you’ve bought.
- The Mistake to Avoid: Using a retainer for high-stakes mission-critical uptime. Retainers are about capacity, not necessarily guaranteed response speed.
3. The SLA (Service Level Agreement)
Best for: Mission-critical systems and “peace of mind.”
This is for organisations where the website is a core operational tool. An SLA is a contract that guarantees uptime and response times. * The Pros: You aren’t just buying time; you’re buying a guarantee. If the site goes down at 2 AM, you know exactly who is fixing it and how fast they have to respond.
- The Cons: It carries a premium because we have to keep resources on standby specifically for you.
- The Mistake to Avoid: Confusing “Support” with “Maintenance.” An SLA isn’t just about pushing plugin updates; it’s about reliability engineering and risk mitigation.
Working with Make Do
Why Work With Us?
This is your chance to work with a team that truly understands your needs and wants the best for your business. We’ve outlined some of the ways we build strong relationships and deliver exceptional results for our clients.
How we help you choose
We don’t just send over a price list. We look at your business risk:
- If the site goes down for an hour, how much money do you lose? (If it’s a lot, you need an SLA).
- Do you have a list of new features you want to build this year? (If yes, you need a Retainer).
- Are you trying to achieve one specific goal by a specific date? (If yes, that’s a Project).
Often, our best clients have a Hybrid Model with an SLA for the “keep the lights on” peace of mind, and a Retainer for the “let’s make this better” growth work.
Common Mistakes
The biggest error we see is clients trying to “Project-manage” their way out of a support problem.
They try to buy a one-off “fix” for a system that actually needs a dedicated retainer. This leads to technical debt, frustrated teams, and eventually, the “bad agency experience” we’ve talked about before.
Let’s map out your needs
Choosing the wrong model is the quickest way to kill a partnership. We’d rather have an honest conversation on day one about what you actually need so get in touch today!
