I’m retired now, but I did create a way to get steady money from my extremely sporadic Unix consulting business.

I could charge a great hourly fee when I was called out for work and I did get plenty of repeat business, but that was often months apart, sometimes years apart with some clients. Big problems don’t come up every day.

So I came up with a retainer fee. For $365 yearly, they could get a discount on all work I did for them that year. The $365 represented about 3 hours of work at the time, so the discount was pegged so they’d break even at about 10 hours of work, which was a normal base for most of them.

A dollar a day to get my attention and loyalty. It worked.

After a few years I had several hundred clients paying me $365 each year. These folks signed up at different times, so the money came in at different times. Some of them kept paying it even though they almost never called me in! They saw it as insurance, that they could call me when needed and that I would show up.

I made out very well with that.