Moderation Retainer Ladder

Moderation Retainer Ladder treats community inbox work as a tiered service line rather than an hourly favor. Tier one is triage only: route member questions, tag product feedback, close the loop inside an agreed window. Tier two adds proactive engagement prompts and a weekly insight digest. Tier three adds escalation ownership, sentiment reporting, and content briefs pulled from member threads. Each rung carries its own SLA and price, so an agency can start a client at triage and expand scope without renegotiating the whole contract. The ladder matters because community platforms differ in how much inbox structure they expose: Circle and Bettermode ship multi-channel inboxes with routing, while Discourse leans on AI-assisted moderation and custom plugins, and Hivebrite bundles member directories and automated workflows that change what counts as a deliverable. Forrester's Q3 2026 research found workflow integration, not model selection, separates agencies that scale AI profitably from those running one-off experiments, which is exactly the gap a tiered moderation contract closes.