>I actively discourage it because it is terrible economics for clients: it’s burning money. Here’s how I did this on software dev projects in the past that I t

>I actively discourage it because it is terrible economics for clients: it’s burning money. Here’s how I did this on software dev projects in the past that I thought was very fair. I did a monthly retainer of $xx,xxx, where that number is equitable for everyone and is actually discounted off the equivalent hourly rate. Why? Because it’s a pain in the ass to track hours, to argue with you in advance over how many hours each task is going to take, to argue after the fact about why it took more hours, etc, etc. So for me, it’s worth a discount to just bill the client monthly, do the work, and everybody wins. But more often than not, clients still wanted to pay the hourly rate premium.