2026 overhaul: Retainer plans and a new client dashboard

This post started out as a part of a larger New Year's resolutions/goals post, and then that post was super long and still not done. And now it's Jan 3rd and I still haven't sent it. So here's the first part. Apparently it's going to be a couple weeks of resolutions, instead of one big drop on Jan 1!

Happy New Year!

December/January always seems like a good time for some reflection. What's working, and what isn't? What can I do better? The change of pace helps, too. There's nothing like 11 hours in the car for some uninterrupted thinking, right?

Retainer plans

I'm not thrilled with how my current retainer plans (let's call them version 1 or "V1") are working. Nominally, retainer plans V1 were supposed to have a monthly allotment, that didn't accumulate from month to month. But in practice, clients would go months without asking for anything, and then want a bunch of work all at once. As my schedule has been fuller, it's been harder to deal with unpredictable bursts of work. I want retainer plans to work well for my clients and for me, and it's been hard to find that balance. So here's the plan for 2026 and retainer plans V2:

• Retainer plan payments are now deposits for work at my regular hourly rate, instead of "you get a squishy 1-2 hours per month". (For clients at $1600/year, that means you now get 16 hours of my time each year. If you're on an older plan at a different price, divide your price by 10 to get your annual hours.) Please let me know if you'd like more or fewer hours before your plan renews.
• Your time will no longer expire, and you may schedule on my calendar whenever you'd like to use your retainer hours, with some time set aside every week so that I can offer retainer clients a shorter queue, particularly for smaller tasks, compared to other clients.
• Cloud function hosting (i.e. for search indexing, webhooks, sign-in integrations, etc) will continue to be included at no added charge.
• If you haven't been using your plan much, I'll credit those hours forward into the retainer plans 2.0. Stay tuned for your exact number of hours, and please reach out if you think what I've estimated is wrong.
• You can now explicitly schedule when I do your work, which should help with some of this year's issues. Retainer clients will see links below for how to do that. (If you aren't, please make sure you're logged in to your paid account.)

New Tech Stack

Back to Basecamp

I've been pretty aggravated with Asana. It's expensive, and the reasons I switched to it no longer apply. As I'm now booking all work hourly, the main reason I went to Asana (a calendar with multiple projects) is gone.

My current Asana plan expires on February 7. If there's anything in Asana that you need access to, please make plans to grab it this month. I will be moving tasks over to Basecamp for a handful of folks who have current requests/jobs, but I'm not intending to move image attachments and completed tasks from a year ago.

If you're currently on retainer or we have an upcoming job, expect to receive an invite to Basecamp from me in the next few days.

Leveraging TidyCal more

I've been using TidyCal for new client scheduling. I'm going to use it even more this year, such as scheduling retainer client work. If you'd like to schedule some paid work, here's my calendar: https://tidycal.com/catsarisky.

BTW, if you are currently paying for a monthly subscription to Calendly or similar, you might want to look at TidyCal's pricing. I've been pretty happy with it, and their pay-once price is about the same as three months of Calendly.

If you want to hire me for new work, the calendar link above is the right way to do it. (Except retainer clients and TNC, who should use their custom links.) If I learned anything in 2025, it's that if something isn't on my calendar, it won't happen.

Harvest for time tracking

I'm going to fully track billable hours worked using Harvest in 2026. It's easy, and it'll let me do a better job actually knowing who used what. If you have a balance due, expect to see future invoices from Harvest instead of direct from Stripe (although they'll use Stripe under the hood).

New dashboard for retainer clients and other regulars

Not quite launched (screenshot is my dev setup), but coming in the next few days: Access to time tracking, tasks, and scheduling, all in one convenient spot. It's not perfect yet (and button margins are being annoying), but it's fast approaching really functional. Here's a preview:

You'll be able to see how much time you have already paid for (for folks on a retainer plan or with an initial deposit), and manage any bills. No, it's not live today. I'll email current clients individually once it is.

I have a little bit of automation* work to do, but I think this is going to be a great place to collect together all our shared work.

(* For those curious: I need to improve my dashboard creation script to set up Basecamp and Harvest and the dashboard and link them all together in one swoop. And I need to set up some automation for Ghost subscription renewals so that they appear in Harvest and in the dashboard without needing manual work from me. And I still need to add a button so that you can add a deposit for additional time right from the dashboard, too. But I'm close, honest!)

Thanks for reading, and happy 2026!

--Cathy