Unlimited design services, do they work? Learnings, 4 months on.

A popular new trend for design studios is the unlimited requests model. We've always worked on a per project basis, but wanted to test it out to see how it felt at Caboodle.

In this post I'll dive into money, what works, what doesn't and what to do about it all.

The unlimited premise makes sense:

• The client can opt out after only a month if they wish, but they get a decent cadence of work. They can ramp up and down as required.
• As a studio, you get a somewhat predictable income with less paperwork. It's quite an easy sell due to lower barriers and almost no commitment to stick with the client should there not be a fit.

There's very low commitment from both sides which is a problem. More on that later.

Pricing

The competition seems to price at around $2500 per month. We priced at £4800 GBP per month. A chase to the bottom is never good, and most of the competition seems to either outsource their work overseas or quickly burns out.

If you've worked with a design partner, I'd love to know what kind of value you feel should be provided for $2500 vs £4800.

The offering

For £4800 per month:

• 1-3 senior level designers working on the project at any one time
• we promised to address work within 3 business days. In practice we delivered every request within 3 days, regardless of size.
• each request needed to consider the design system, and be dev ready
• for any request (unless tiny) we'd create a Loom walkthrough video, and 2-3 directions the client could take.
• we maintained their design system
• we provided a custom Trello template based around Jobs-to-be-done
• we did not provide any other design service. No marketing sites, no logos, no print work. There is one thing we are shit hot at, and that is SaaS product design (this includes UX consultancy, wire framing, ideation, UI design and design systems).

Challenges in practice

Challenge: Some requests were significant and complex, think re-working an entire feature, which then has a knock-on impact elsewhere.

Solution: Ideation was kept low-fi using existing elements from the design system. We'd then break the request into versions from v1: fast to implement, to v3: the full feature.

Challenge: If a request needs questions and some back-and-forth this can quickly eat up days (even with a PO, they aren't constantly available).

Solution: To maintain constant forward momentum, instead of putting together one option for each request we created 2-3 options, explaining the trade-offs for each in a Loom video. The PO could then make an informed decision. This offers a lot of value but takes more time than just sending out a 'best guess' — less experienced designers will tend to think in a vacuum, and these trade-offs get flagged too late.

Async design collaboration using Loom is a game-changer, we use it on every project (no affiliation)

Challenge: Context jumping between features requires deep knowledge of the product.

Solution: We have discovery and walkthroughs sessions for the first few days to cover most of the product. We provided a request framework in Trello that provides the context required to improve or define a feature. It looks like this:

Challenge: Clients struggled only having one request at a time, especially when they're waiting to provide feedback and need a wider or C-level decision made.

Solution: In the end we added a new column for 'Up next' features, and another for 'Awaiting feedback'. I think this was a mistake and I'd ditch the 'Awaiting feedback' column because it meant there was no respite.

Challenge: Some requests would impact each-other, or work as blockers, which in agile environment, you'd typically flag and re-prioritise. In an async environment where client as control over priorities, this can slow things down.

Solution: This is hard to foresee, and can crop up at any point, we flagged early and often whenever this might occur and pushed for making request priorities clear.

Does this work?

From a customer perspective

At the $2500 price point — if you're a scrappy startup, that wants fast but not necessarily thoughtful work - or just need marketing materials like landing pages/print stuff it makes sense, but because there is no real commitment from either side I think it's flawed from the outset for SaaS products. Its biggest win is almost its biggest problem. Over time I could see it encouraging churned out, subpar work. It does not encourage strong relationships.

At the £4800 price point— you get a senior team constantly available which is tough (and risky) to put together yourself, but at this price, there will be a temptation to hire in-house and commit to a full-timer or get lucky with a good freelancer. Bear in mind a single senior designer is ~£450-£500 per day, and won't always be available.

From a design studio founder perspective

Scaling this is tricky. It's not easy to find decent senior level designers that are available whenever you need them. I hired 1 to make our team 3 senior level designers. I feel 1 designer could service 2 clients well per week (talking SaaS product here, not landing pages etc). At 400-500pd, there is little to no margin here.

One model that could work would be to engage larger businesses where 5k is not a huge amount. They're paying for guaranteed availability not constant delivery.

A part ownership model might also be one way to involve a high calibre of designer.

Otherwise the $2500 pm using less experienced designers may work for marketing type design work. Either way, I don't want to be delivering rushed work to clients, so neither the £4800 nor the $2500 price point work long-term for me personally.

What did we end up doing?

We offer per project and a monthly engagement models now.

Monthly — We've bumped the price to £9,800pm so we can commit to a smaller number of customers, forge strong relationships and still deliver a high level of work without burning out.

Per project — Kept as-is. It's predictable, in that we can build a scope around needs and goals. Our process is honed to a fine edge at this point.

What's your experience?

Have you hired using the monthly model, or run one yourself? How did it go?