← Freelance retainer calculator
This calculator vs. Bonsai
Different jobs: one prices a retainer, the other runs the paperwork around a freelance business.
Bonsai is a well-known paid subscription platform for freelancers, built to run the business side of the work — proposals, contracts, invoicing, and time tracking, described on hellobonsai.com. Its templates include a retainer agreement, and it publishes a general hourly-rate explorer by skill and role. It is the kind of tool a freelancer reaches for once they already have a price and need the paperwork and billing built around it.
That is a different job from the one this page does. This calculator has no invoicing, no contracts, no client records, and no account. It exists for the narrower task that comes before any of that: turning your income goal, real billable capacity, operating costs, and scope buffer into a defensible retainer price — and checking that price still covers your hourly floor at light use, full use, and overage, with nothing to sign up for.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| What should I charge for this retainer, given my costs, capacity, and income goal? | This calculator — it prices the block from your own numbers and checks the price against your hourly floor at 50%, 75%, 100%, and 125% usage. |
| How do I send the client a proposal, contract, and recurring invoice for that price? | Bonsai or a comparable paid platform — proposal drafting, e-signatures, and billing are jobs this page does not attempt. |
| Does an unused-hour rollover clause or Net 30 still leave me able to float the month? | This calculator — the rollover and payment-terms pages model exactly that, with no account and nothing uploaded. |
| Do I need time tracking, client CRM, or a shared workspace across several ongoing clients? | Bonsai or a comparable paid platform — this page remembers nothing about your clients between visits except what your own browser stores locally. |
This calculator is deliberately the opposite shape from a subscription platform: nothing to sign up for, nothing billed monthly, and nothing typed here ever leaves your browser. That makes it useful for pricing one retainer honestly before you open any proposal tool — and the wrong tool for running the invoicing, contracts, and client records of an ongoing freelance business, which is exactly the job a paid platform like Bonsai is built for.
It needs no account and no sign-in: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and once it has loaded it keeps working with the connection off.
Common questions
Should I use this calculator or a paid tool like Bonsai?
They answer different questions. Bonsai is a paid subscription platform for running a freelance business end to end — invoicing, contracts, proposals, and time tracking, with a retainer agreement template among its documents, described on its own site. This calculator does none of that. It answers one narrower question first: from your income goal, real billable capacity, costs, and a scope buffer, what should the retainer price actually be, and does it still cover your hourly floor at light, full, and heavy usage. Once you have that number, Bonsai (or any contract tool) is where you might draft the agreement around it.
Is this page affiliated with Bonsai?
No. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Bonsai. Bonsai is named here only to describe what this calculator is and is not.
Open the retainer calculator to price your own plan, then check it against real usage and payment terms.