01
Reserved capacity
An agreed block of design and development time each month, held for you rather than fitted in.
Improve
A design team, without the hiring.
Some work never finishes. If you are shipping continuously but not ready to hire a designer and a developer outright, a monthly arrangement gives you reserved time from people who already know your product.
Why it matters
The short version.
Project work has a natural shape: it starts, it ships, everyone leaves. That suits a website or a launch. It suits ongoing product work badly, because the useful improvements arrive continuously in small pieces that never individually justify commissioning a project.
So those improvements queue. The design debt accumulates, the small friction points stay, and eventually enough of them pile up that you commission a redesign — which is the expensive way to pay for maintenance you deferred.
A monthly arrangement exists to prevent that. The practical benefit is not really the hours; it is that the people doing the work already know your product, your users and your constraints, so nothing needs re-explaining and small things get fixed while they are still small.
A redesign is often just the expensive way to pay for maintenance you deferred.
Is this you?
You probably need this if…
- You ship regularly and design is the bottleneck every time
- Hiring a full-time designer is not justified yet
- Your last agency disappeared the moment the project ended
- Small improvements keep getting deferred because nobody owns them
What's involved
The actual work.
No two engagements are identical, but this is the shape of it.
02
Continuous improvement
The backlog of small things that individually never justify a project but collectively matter a lot.
03
Design system ownership
Keeping the system current as the product grows, instead of letting it drift.
04
Support and maintenance
Dependency updates, fixes and the unglamorous work that keeps software healthy.
What goes wrong
Mistakes worth
avoiding.
Named plainly, because most of them are easier to avoid than to undo.
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Treating it as an emergency line
A retainer used only for firefighting delivers far less than one with a planned improvement backlog. Reactive work is the most expensive kind.
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No agreed priorities
Without a shared view of what matters most this month, the loudest internal request wins and the important work keeps sliding.
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Buying more hours than you can direct
Capacity you have no time to point at is wasted money. Better to start small and grow than to buy a large block and underuse it.
How it runs
Start to finish.
Each phase ends in something you can open, click or read.
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01
Agree the shape
How much time, which areas, and how we prioritise together.
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02
Weekly rhythm
Priorities on Monday, work through the week, staging deploy Friday.
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03
Monthly review
What shipped, what it achieved, what comes next.
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04
Adjust freely
Scale up, scale down, pause or stop with thirty days notice.
Deliverables
What you walk
away with.
Yours to keep, whatever happens next.
Named people who know your product
A shared board and channel — no ticket portal
A monthly written summary of what shipped
No long lock-in; cancel with thirty days notice
Questions
Worth asking.
Anything else — email hello@haddon.software and a human replies the same business day.
We will tell you rather than invent work. Unused time can roll once, and if it keeps happening we will suggest reducing the arrangement — a retainer that stops being worth it is bad for both of us.
That is the usual path. Most partnerships start after a build, once we already know the product and your team.
Yes. Continuity is most of the value — the alternative is re-explaining your product to a stranger every month.
We ask for three months to start, because the first month is mostly us learning your product and you would not get fair value from a single one. After that it runs month to month with thirty days notice.
Yes. Seasonal businesses do this routinely. We would rather pause cleanly and pick up later than have you paying for capacity you do not need this quarter.
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Want to talk it through?
The first call is free, runs about thirty minutes, and you'll get a straight answer about whether we're the right fit — including when we're not.