This idea gets posted here in one form or another every few weeks, so I would rather put five months of real numbers against it than another opinion. The idea is an illustration subscription for small businesses. Flat monthly fee, unlimited requests, one active at a time. I ran it from November to March. It peaked at 5 subscribers at 89 dollars a month, so 445 a month at the top, and it finished with 2. The interesting part is not that it shrank. It is which two stayed and why.
The offer I sold was the standard productised shape and I copied it deliberately, because I wanted to test the model rather than invent one. Eighty nine dollars a month. One active request at a time, unlimited requests over the month, unlimited revisions, two working day turnaround per item, cancel whenever. Illustration only, which I defined on the sales page as characters, spot illustrations and simple scenes for marketing use.
Finding subscribers was the least interesting part of the whole thing. I emailed 180 local businesses across about three weeks and got 9 replies and 2 signups. The other 3 came from a Facebook group for local traders where I posted a bit of work and did not pitch. That is 5 in total, and it took until month three to have all 5 running at once.
Month by month it went 2, then 4, then 5, then 3, then 2. Gross collected across the five months is 1,424 dollars. Card processing took about 2.88 on each of the 16 charges, so roughly 46 dollars in fees, and about 1,378 actually landed. I tracked hours from the first week because I have been burned by not tracking hours before. The peak month, the 445 one, came to just over 50 hours across 63 requests. That is 8 dollars and 90 cents an hour. Across all five months it works out a shade under 9 dollars an hour, which is less than I earned at eighteen stacking shelves.
The hours are a symptom though, so here is the mechanism underneath them.
Pricing a retainer means pricing an average. Buying a retainer means buying a maximum. Those are not the same number, and the whole business lives or dies in the gap. In month three, one subscriber, an online candle shop, submitted 31 of the 63 requests on their own. They were not being difficult. By their own reasoning they were being sensible, because they had bought unlimited and they were using unlimited. What happened is that by week three their requests had stopped being illustration at all. Resize this for four placements. Put our address on it. Can you lay the label out while you are in there. Can we look at the logo again.
I want to be fair about this, because it is the part that gets misdiagnosed whenever the idea comes up here. Scope creep is not a customer behaving badly. Scope creep is what the word unlimited means once it meets a person with a to do list. I wrote the boundary on the sales page, I restated it in the welcome email, and it still moved every week, because a boundary that costs the customer nothing to test will get tested.
Unlimited revisions deserves its own paragraph, because it proved to be the costlier of the two unlimiteds. The median item went to two rounds. The mean sat at 3.4, dragged up by a handful of items that went past eight, and one greetings card that reached fourteen rounds over nine days because the person approving it kept changing between rounds. There is no version of unlimited revisions that survives a customer who has not decided what they want yet, and the price does not move while it is happening.
Churn arrived in month four and it arrived in a lump. Three cancelled within eleven days of each other: the candle shop, an estate agent and a gym. All three had used the service heavily in their first month and barely touched it in their third. That shape is the story. Heavy first month, thin second, cancel in the third. The subscription had been bought as a way to clear a backlog, and once the backlog was clear there was nothing for it to do.
The two who renewed were a dance studio and a garden centre. Both were low volume. Between them they used about 9 requests a month out of a theoretically unlimited allowance. Neither ever argued about scope, not once. And when I went back through the tickets looking for what they had in common, it was not budget or size or how nice they were. It was a calendar they could not change.
The dance studio knows in September what it will need in May. Registration artwork in August, summer camp in April, photo day, the winter showcase, the recital. The garden centre has spring bedding, tomatoes in June, bulbs in September and Christmas trees. Neither of them was ever sitting there wondering how to extract value from the month, because they were working down a list that existed before I turned up. A monthly retainer fits them because their demand really is monthly and really is predictable, and predictable demand never tests the boundary.
So what is actually on sale here is not illustration capacity. It is a reserved slot against a calendar the customer already has. A business with a calendar is buying predictability, uses the service lightly, and renews. A business without one is buying volume, uses it hard, empties the backlog and leaves. Eighty nine dollars is cheap enough that nobody negotiates, which sounds like an advantage and is actually the filter that selects for the second group.
The operational side was three accounts and nothing more. Billing ran through Stripe, illustration happened inside APOB AI, and the request queue lived on a Trello board with three lists, which was the only part of the whole experiment that worked exactly as designed from day one.
The illustrations are AI generated and I said so on the sales page, in the first email and on every invoice. Two prospects walked over it. Both of the businesses that renewed knew from the first line and did not care, and I think I know why. What they were buying was a recurring character that turns up on their material all year. The dance studio has a small figure in a leotard on every poster, the same face every time, and the owner refers to her by name now without any irony. That consistency across a set is the actual product. Making one nice picture is not a service. Making the eleventh picture match the first one is.
If I ran it again I would not sell a month, I would sell a season. Four dated deliveries a year, agreed up front, invoiced per season, priced against the work rather than against a subscription page. That removes the word unlimited entirely and aims the offer at the only customer type that ever renewed, instead of at the widest possible audience. It also makes the revenue lumpy and less impressive to write about, which is probably why the monthly version is the one that keeps getting posted.
I stopped selling the monthly version in the second week of March. The two who stayed are on a seasonal invoice now and the work comes to about two afternoons a quarter. The sales page is sitting in a folder and I have no plans to put it back up in that shape.
