Most ecommerce agencies open a relationship with the same paperwork. A contract. An onboarding fee. A monthly retainer that locks in revenue whether the work is happening or not. We do not work that way at MageCloud, and we never have.
What I am most proud of, after more than a decade running this team, is that the relationships still hold without any of those structures around them. No contract. No upfront payment. No monthly retainer fee. No fancy sales pitch. The team stays with the client because the client wants them to, and the work continues because it should.
No Contract. No Retainer. No Sales Pitch.
Why We Stopped Using Retainers Years Ago
Retainers solve a problem for the agency, not for the client. They smooth out revenue, they let the agency staff up against a known number, and they reduce the awkward conversation about whether next month’s work is happening. Almost everything about a retainer is a tool for the seller.
From the founder’s side of the table, retainers are mostly a tax. You pay for capacity you might not need. You feel pressure to invent work to “use up” the hours. You discover, three quarters in, that the agency has rotated three different junior staff through your account because they had to fill the time. None of that is a fair trade for the budget being moved.
We took retainers off the table a long time ago because we wanted the relationship to be re-decided every month based on whether the work was useful. If we delivered something the client valued, the next thing came. If we did not, the relationship paused and nobody had to negotiate around a contract to make that pause happen.
What “No Sales Pitch” Looks Like in Practice
I do not do polished sales calls. I do not have a deck with case-study logos rotating in the corner. I do not run a discovery process that ends in a beautifully designed proposal. The first conversation I have with a prospective client is almost always the same. They tell me what is broken on their store. I tell them what I think we can do, what it will cost, and how long it will take. We agree or we do not.
The reason that works is the same reason it makes most agency owners nervous. There is nowhere to hide. If we say a Magento upgrade will take six weeks and it takes nine, the client knows we missed. If we say we can recover their site speed and we cannot, they know within a sprint. The honest framing forces us to be specific from minute one and to actually deliver against the specifics.
What I have noticed is that founders who have already been burned by an agency, and most have, hear this approach and exhale. They have spent the last six months unwinding a contract with someone who oversold and underdelivered. The conversation that opens with “no contract, no retainer, just the work” is a relief.
How the Team Stays With Clients Without a Contract Forcing Them To
The argument against this engagement model is that it should not be stable. Without a contract, what stops the client from switching agencies tomorrow? Without a retainer, how does the team plan capacity?
The answer is that the work itself is the contract. Our developers know our clients’ codebases, deployment pipelines, third-party integrations, and quirks. That context is not transferable. A new agency stepping in would spend the first month reconstructing what our team already knows, and the client would feel that pain.
So clients stay because switching is more expensive than continuing, not because a contract says they have to. And our team stays staffed because we have proven over years that the next sprint is almost always there. The pipeline does not come from prospecting. It comes from finishing what is on the desk well enough that the next thing rolls in behind it.
The Trade-Off I Will Admit To
This model is harder to scale than a retainer-driven agency. It rewards depth over breadth. It punishes us when we have a slow month, because there is no contractual floor catching the revenue. It is not the model I would recommend to someone trying to triple headcount in twelve months.
What it does well is keep the team and the clients aligned. Nobody is on the hook for capacity that no longer makes sense. Nobody is paying to hold a seat. The pressure on us to ship something useful every sprint is constant, and that pressure shows up in the work.
I am also not pretending this is the only honest way to run an agency. There are agencies with retainers that do excellent work. There are agencies with contracts that respect the client at every turn. The point is not that contracts are wrong. The point is that I do not need them to keep my team and my clients in a healthy place, and that has been true for long enough that I trust it.
What I Would Tell a Founder Choosing an Agency Today
If you are evaluating an ecommerce agency in 2026, I would push you to ask three questions before signing anything.
What happens in month four if the work I need is half what we agreed in month one? If the answer is that you still pay the full retainer, the agency is set up for the agency, not for you. A healthy partner will scale with what you actually need.
Who specifically will be doing the work? Not the senior who pitched it. The actual engineer. If the agency cannot tell you their name in the first call, you are not buying expertise, you are buying a queue.
What does it look like to leave? A good agency will answer this without flinching. They will tell you what handover looks like, what documentation you will keep, and how the codebase will be left. If the answer is vague or hostile, the contract is what is keeping you, not the work.
Those three questions cut through almost every sales pitch in the agency world. The agencies that answer them well are the ones worth working with. The agencies that get evasive are the ones a contract is hiding from you.
If you want to talk through what an honest engagement model looks like for your store, or how we structure projects at MageCloud without retainers, come find me at the next Ecommerce Camp UK. I will be the one not handing out brochures.