Charge a setup fee before the first retainer month
Month one of a retainer is mostly unbillable: intake, style lock, asset library, approval workflow. What to itemise and how to defend it on the call.
Month one of a retainer is where the profit goes to die. Not because the work is hard, but because roughly half of it produces nothing the client can watch.
You spend the first fortnight extracting a brand that has never been written down, testing looks until one of them stops getting rejected, assembling reference material the client swore they already had, and negotiating who is allowed to approve a video. Then you deliver the same number of videos you will deliver in month six, for the same fee, having done all of that as well.
Setup fees exist for exactly this. A separate one-off onboarding fee is a standard line on agency rate cards for small-business social work, and the amount varies enormously because the work behind it does — but its routine presence tells you the line item is normal in the market you are selling into. The reason freelancers skip it is not that clients refuse. It is that the freelancer cannot describe what it buys.
What month one actually contains
Break a first month down honestly and it splits into two piles. One pile is deliverables. The other pile is infrastructure that will be used every month afterwards and produced exactly once.
The infrastructure pile:
- Brand intake. Getting the tone, the vocabulary, the claims they are legally allowed to make, the words they will not say, the competitor they must not resemble, and the colour that is not quite the colour in their logo file.
- Style lock. Producing options and getting one approved as the standard, so that month two is production instead of debate.
- Asset library. Collecting or building the product shots, the premises footage, the logo files in a usable format, the licensed music, and the reusable characters or product references the whole engagement will be generated against.
- Approval workflow. Deciding who reviews, in what form, by when, and what happens when they miss it.
Every one of those is real work that a client benefits from for the life of the relationship. None of it is a video. That mismatch is what the setup fee resolves.
The four line items
Itemise it. A single line reading "onboarding — $1,500" gets challenged. Four lines describing four artefacts get approved, because each one names something the client will possess afterwards.
| Line item | What is produced | What it removes from every later month |
|---|---|---|
| Brand intake and voice profile | A written brand profile: tone, vocabulary, banned claims, competitor no-go list, approved product language | The "that's not how we'd say it" round |
| Style lock | An approved visual standard — look, caption style, typography, colour, aspect-ratio default | The look debate, re-run per video |
| Asset library build | Logos, product references, reusable characters or product likenesses, licensed music bed, stock selects | Hunting for a usable logo file on a Thursday |
| Workflow and approval setup | Named approver, review format, turnaround SLA, delivery structure, file naming scheme | Ambiguity about who said yes |
Each of those has a concrete build on the production side, which matters when a client asks what you are actually doing with the money.
The brand profile is a thing the agent can hold rather than a document you re-read. Setting a brand kit stores the caption preset, colours and default aspect ratio so they apply without being restated, and teaching the agent a lasting preference is how the softer rules — the words they will not say — stop being something you remember and start being something the pipeline enforces. The brand kit entry covers the concept, and building a brand voice system is the long version of the intake itself.
The style lock is the item clients understand fastest, because they have lived the alternative. Getting one look approved and applying it everywhere is the difference between a library and a pile. On the caption side specifically, keeping captions on brand across every video is the repeatable version, and a style preset is the unit you are locking.
The asset library is where the most durable value sits. Setting up reusable characters and products is the piece that makes month two cheap: once a product or a presenter is registered as a reusable reference, every subsequent generation starts from something consistent rather than from a prompt and a hope. That is character consistency as an operational asset rather than a model property.
The workflow item is the least glamorous and the one that saves the most calendar time. A share link on a generation turns "can you email it again" into a URL, and the wider review loop built on previews and share links is the structure that makes a one-round revision cap enforceable rather than aspirational. If the engagement runs the same structure weekly, saving and reusing a workflow is what turns setup into leverage.
How to justify it on the call
Three sentences, in this order, before they ask.
"There's a one-off setup fee before month one. It covers the brand profile, the style lock, your asset library and the approval workflow — the things that only get built once but get used every month after. Month one is the only month where a chunk of the work isn't a video, and the fee is what stops that coming out of your first month's deliverables."
Say it early, in the same document as the scope, never as a follow-up. A setup fee introduced after the monthly number has been agreed reads as a bait-and-switch; the same fee presented alongside the scope reads as a standard structure, which it is.
Three objections and what actually answers them:
"Can you roll it into the monthly?" Yes, over three months, at a premium — and say why: rolling it in means the first month's deliverable count drops, because the setup work has to come from somewhere. Give them the choice explicitly. Most take the separate fee once they see the trade.
"Our brand guidelines already exist, so surely that part's quicker?" Sometimes. Offer to reduce the intake line specifically if they can send the guidelines before kickoff, and hold the other three. This is a good-faith concession that costs you little and buys enormous credibility, because it demonstrates the line items are real rather than decorative.
"What if it doesn't work out after a month?" They keep everything the setup fee produced — the brand profile, the approved style, the asset library, the workflow document. Say that out loud. A setup fee that produces transferable artefacts is defensible; one that produces only your convenience is not, and clients can tell the difference.
What it buys you, not just them
The reason to insist on this is not only the revenue. It is what the fee does to the shape of the engagement.
A paid setup phase gives you permission to spend real time on intake before you are on a delivery clock. Unpaid, that time comes out of production and you rush it, which means the style is never properly locked and month three still contains look debates. Paid, you can run options, get a decision, and write it down.
It also front-loads cash against real spend. Every generation on Versely draws credits — there is no free plan, no free trial, and no free allowance to absorb an exploratory phase — so the option-testing a style lock requires is a genuine outlay in a month with fewer deliverables to show for it. The one exception is the editor's 480p preview pass, free with a short per-user cooldown between passes, with a single charge on the final export. Everything upstream of the editor is credits, and the setup fee is what covers it. Checking credits before generating keeps an intake month from quietly overrunning, and the plan and pack ladder sits on the pricing page.
Finally, a client who has paid a setup fee behaves differently. They send the logo files. They name an approver. They turn up to the kickoff call. Unpaid onboarding is treated as your admin; paid onboarding is treated as a project they have a stake in, and that difference shows up in every subsequent month's turnaround.
FAQ
How much should the setup fee be?
The band you will see quoted is far too wide to be a recommendation on its own. A workable anchor at the entry tier is roughly half to one times the monthly retainer — enough to cover a light-deliverable first month, small enough not to stall the deal. Scale it with how much of the four line items actually needs building: a client with real brand guidelines and usable product photography needs far less than one starting from a phone camera roll.
Should the setup fee be refundable?
No, and say so in the same breath as saying what they keep. The artefacts are delivered whether or not the retainer continues, which is what makes non-refundable fair rather than punitive. Pair it with the deposit and payment clauses in the same document rather than treating it as a separate negotiation.
What if the client wants to start producing in week one?
Run a short intake, lock a provisional style, and produce against it — but write into the scope that the provisional style is revisited at the end of month one, and that videos produced before the lock are not re-made for free. Clients who want speed can have it; what they cannot have is speed plus retrospective consistency at no cost.
Which of the four line items matters most if I can only sell one?
The asset library. A style lock without assets still leaves you sourcing material every month, and a brand profile without assets is a document. Reusable product and character references are the item that most changes how long month two takes, which makes them the easiest to justify and the hardest for a client to reproduce themselves. For the monthly scope the fee sits in front of, see the local business content retainer.