Most agencies will not let you off the monthly subscription. The site is hosted on their account, the domain is registered in their name, the content lives in their CMS. The site is yours, mechanically, but only as long as you keep paying. The day you stop paying, the site goes dark and the leverage in the room changes.
We refuse to run a business that way. Subscriptions at Mule are optional, never required to keep the site online.
What "optional" actually looks like
Every site we ship lands on a hosting account in your name, with a domain registered in your name, with source files on a repository under your account. If you drop the optional retainer in six months, the site keeps running. The bill goes to you instead of to us. You answer your own email, you watch your own analytics, you handle your own small monthly polish. The site does not change.
We offer the retainer because most small-business owners do not want to do those things. Hosting bills, analytics dashboards, the occasional security patch, the quarterly review of what is and is not working: these add up to a job a small business does not have time for. So we do that work for ninety-nine dollars a month and give the owner their Friday afternoons back.
That is the entire pitch. We are not gating the site behind the retainer. We are offering a service.
What is in the light retainer
For the standard ninety-nine dollar tier, every month, we do:
- A real read of your Google Analytics 4 dashboard, with a short note summarising what moved and what did not.
- A small polish pass: two to four content updates, a copy edit, a new photo dropped in, whatever the site needs that month.
- A check that hosting, domain, and SSL are all paid up and not about to expire.
- A check that your forms still send mail, that your Google Business Profile is showing the right hours, and that no broken links have crept in.
- A "what is breaking in your industry" note tied to a real concern, not generic agency speak.
You can cancel at the end of any month. We do not charge a cancellation fee. The site keeps running.
What Full Suite includes for free
The Full Suite tier (currently $2,999) includes the first ninety days of the retainer at no extra cost. After ninety days, you decide whether to keep paying for the retainer or to take the keys and run the site yourself. About forty percent of our Full Suite clients drop the retainer at the ninety-day mark. We are fine with that. Often they come back six months later for a quarterly review, which we bill on a flat-fee basis.
Why we wrote this down
Because every quarter we lose a project to an agency that quotes a slightly lower upfront number and then folds a $400/mo subscription into the contract that the operator does not catch. Two years in they have paid $9,600 in subscriptions on top of the original site, and there is no way to leave without losing the URL.
We would rather lose the deal upfront and keep our reputation intact. If you read your contract carefully and the monthly fee is mandatory, that is fine for some businesses. It is not how we do it.