Every question we get before someone books the interview.

Those are real tools and they are cheap - around $25 a month. They are also genuinely good at getting a prototype in front of you fast. The honest gap is between a prototype you clicked together and something your front desk still depends on three months from now: hosting that does not fall over, a fix when something breaks, and someone to call who is not you. That gap is what the retainer is for. If you have the time to learn the tool and babysit it yourself, that is a completely reasonable choice.

Custom development from a traditional agency usually runs $15,000-$60,000 or more. AI-focused agencies often land between $2,500 and $15,000 for setup, plus their own retainers on top. Both are built for a different budget than one single-purpose internal tool. This is priced and scoped for exactly one workflow, not a full engagement.

That's what the retainer covers. Software that nobody maintains tends to quietly break - a dependency updates, a system it connects to changes something, a browser update shifts how a page renders. The retainer keeps someone actually watching it, not just handing it over and disappearing.

Small adjustments - a new form field, a tweak to how a report looks, a small rule change - are covered under the retainer. Bigger requests, like adding a second workflow entirely, get scoped and quoted as their own small project instead of being silently folded in.

One tool, one workflow: a digital intake and consent form, a package or membership balance tracker, a daily schedule view, a commission calculator, a photo-consent log, an inventory-per-treatment tracker. Not a full practice-management system, not a patient-facing mobile app, not a rebuild of your booking software. If what you need is bigger than that, we will say so at the interview instead of pretending otherwise.

The scope gets fixed at the interview, before the 48-hour build starts. If something changes mid-build, we talk about it - small things get absorbed, anything that meaningfully changes the shape of the tool gets re-scoped as a new build rather than quietly expanding the original one.

No. This is small and early - a founding cohort of med spas, not an established agency with a bench of developers. You work directly with the person scoping and building your tool, not an account manager relaying to someone else. That's a tradeoff worth naming plainly, not hiding.

Yes. It is your tool, running for your business.

It's month to month. Cancel whenever it stops being worth it to you. The tool you already paid to build keeps working as it was left - the retainer is what keeps it maintained and changing with you going forward, not a lock-in mechanism.

It depends on what that specific system exposes - an export, an API, a calendar feed. We look at what's actually available during the interview and scope the connection around that, rather than promising a named integration before checking.