Retainer Floor Math

Retainer Floor Math is the practice of calculating the minimum monthly retainer a client account can support before any email work begins, using the platform fee as the floor rather than the ceiling. A 5,000-contact list on a low-cost sender such as EmailOctopus or Moosend costs the client a few tens of dollars a month, so a retainer priced against that fee alone collapses to near zero margin. The framework says the sellable unit is the bundle: list growth, segmentation, creative, and sends. Agencies that price the bundle hold margin; agencies that price the tool lose the account to a freelancer. The same logic applies to white-label resale, where BigMailer and Mailmunch let an agency consolidate many client brands under one dashboard, turning per-client tool cost into a shared line item that no single retainer has to carry.