Personal Brain Retainer · Standard
For brains that are actively evolving.
Month-to-month. Cancel any time with 30 days notice.
Personal Brain Install clients whose work is actively evolving and who want the brain evolving with it.
Everything in the Light retainer, plus new skill development (up to 2/quarter), a real quarterly review, and proactive capacity for the months when your work changes shape.
When Standard is the right choice.
The Light retainercovers the operational maintenance baseline. The Standard retainer is for clients whose brain is actively part of their work’s evolution — they’re adding new capabilities to it, expanding what it covers, refining the skills as their workflows mature.
Common profile: someone whose work has changed materially in the past 6–12 months. A new role with different requirements. A new market or domain that needs corpus coverage. A shift in workflow where the existing skills no longer cover the right ground. The Standard retainer means you don’t have to re-engage on a per-project basis every time you want the brain to grow.
If your work is mostly stable and the brain is doing what you need, Light is the more honest math. If your work is in motion and the brain needs to be in motion with it, Standard.
What Standard adds over Light
Proactive evolution.
2 new skills/quarter
Beyond the 3–5 from the Install. Scoped at quarterly review, built within the quarter. Skills compound and reference each other.
90-min quarterly review
What's the brain doing well, where's the gap, what changed in your work, what skills to add. The strategic direction call.
Proactive capacity
When Claude ships a new feature you should use, MCP gets a new capability, Cloudflare adds a primitive — I bring it to you, not the other way around.
Same-day break/fix
Incidents get same-day response (vs. next-business-day on Light). Same 30-min average fix time, just faster trigger.
Mid-quarter check-in
30-min call mid-quarter to track skill progress and surface ops issues. Smaller cadence than the full review, enough to keep work compounding.
“By year-end of a Standard retainer, you have eleven to thirteen installed skills tuned to your work — a personal library compounded across months of use.”
Brain in motion?
Start Standard the first of next month.
No commitment past 30-day notice. Slot rolls forward one quarter. Downgrade to Light any month if your pace settles.
What two new skills per quarter looks like.
A skill is a reusable workflow installed inside an AI tool that calls your brain for a specific recurring task. Examples that get added during Standard retainers:
“Draft a client recap in my voice using the prior three recaps as reference, and flag anything that’s changed from the last one.”
“Review this contract against the standard terms in my corpus. Tell me what’s different from my usual baseline and whether the differences are favorable.”
“Synthesize this week’s research notes into a coherent thesis update for my current project, structured the way I structure these.”
Each skill is named, scoped, tuned, and installed inside the AI tool you use most. Two per quarter means by year-end you have 11–13 installed skills tuned to your work — a personal library compounded across months of use.
Common questions
Asked, answered.
What if I don't use both skill slots in a quarter?
The slots don’t roll over indefinitely, but one unused slot rolls into the next quarter (so a quarter where you only used one means the next quarter has three available). Two unused slots in a row probably means you should be on Light.
Can I upgrade to Standard mid-month from Light?
Yes, pro-rated within the month. The next quarterly review schedules from the upgrade date, not retroactively.
Can my company pay for this?
Yes, if it serves your role at the company. The Personal Brain remains yours regardless of who pays — that’s the design of the install. Most Standard retainers paid by employers are explicitly part of the employee’s benefit package.
What if I need more than 2 skills in a quarter?
Additional skills beyond the retainer allocation are priced at $1,500/each at the retainer rate (vs. $2,500 for non-retainer clients). If you regularly need more than 2 per quarter, it might be worth a conversation about whether you’re really running an Install-scale operation that should be on a different engagement structure.
How does this differ from the Coaching Retainer?
The Personal Brain Retainer (both tiers) is operational maintenance + capability development on a specific installed brain. The Coaching Retaineris 1-on-1 coaching on your work and role broadly, independent of any specific install. They’re complementary; some clients do both.
Adjacent paths
Where this connects.
Already have an Install? Just email me.
The retainer is for existing Personal Brain Install clients. If you haven’t done the Install yet, start with the Diagnostic Call. If you have, drop me a note and we’ll start the retainer the first of the next month.
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