We map your actual work — the tools, the gaps, the shape your role needs.
Personal Brain Retainer · Standard
For brains that are actively evolving.
Duration
Month-to-month. Cancel any time with 30 days notice.
Who it fits
Personal Brain clients whose work is actively evolving and who want the brain evolving with it.
Everything in Light, plus new skill development (up to 2/quarter), a real quarterly review, and proactive capacity for the months your work changes shape.
How it works
Diagnose. Build. Hand you the keys.
One method, three moves: we map your actual work, build your private brain from it, and hand you the keys — owned, portable, queryable from anywhere.
We build your private brain from it — your corpus, indexed and queryable.
It's yours. Reach it from any LLM, at your own subdomain. You own it.
It stays current. It grows with you. Never required.
Optional ongoing care for a brain you already own — never a condition of keeping it.
New work flows in and the brain keeps learning — without you running the upkeep. The corpus compounds instead of going stale.
Retrieval shapes, new skills, and connectors adjust as your role and tools change — so it keeps answering the way you need.
You already own the brain. The retainer is for ongoing tuning — never a requirement to keep what you bought.
When Standard is the right choice.
The Light retainercovers the operational maintenance baseline. Standard is for clients whose brain is part of their work’s evolution — adding new capabilities, expanding what it covers, refining skills as workflows mature.
Common profile: work that has changed materially in the past 6–12 months. A new role with different requirements. A new market that needs corpus coverage. A workflow shift where the existing skills no longer cover the right ground. Standard means you don’t re-engage per-project every time you want the brain to grow.
If your work is stable and the brain does what you need, Light is the more honest math. If your work is in motion and the brain needs to move with it, Standard.
“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.”
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 the brain does well, where the gaps are, what changed in your work, what skills to add. The strategic direction call.
Proactive capacity
When Claude ships a feature you should use, MCP gets a new capability, Cloudflare adds a primitive — we bring it to you. When the next model launches, your brain migrates and the retrieval contract holds. The retainer covers the migration.
Same-day break/fix
Incidents get same-day response (vs. next-business-day on Light). Same 30-min average fix, faster trigger.
Mid-quarter check-in
30-min call mid-quarter to track skill progress and surface ops issues. Smaller than the full review, enough to keep work compounding.
Brain in motion?
Start Standard the first of next month.
No commitment past 30-day notice. One slot rolls forward a 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 recurring task. Examples 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 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?
Slots don’t roll over indefinitely, but one unused slot rolls into the next quarter (so a quarter where you used one leaves three available next). 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.
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. Most employer-paid Standard retainers are explicitly part of the employee’s benefit package.
What if I need more than 2 skills in a quarter?
Additional skills beyond the allocation are $1,500/each at the retainer rate (vs. $2,500 for non-retainer clients). If you regularly need more than 2 per quarter, it’s worth a conversation about whether you’re running an Install-scale operation that belongs on a different structure.
How does this differ from the Coaching Retainer?
The Personal Brain Retainer (both tiers) is operational maintenance plus capability development on a specific installed brain. The Coaching Retaineris 1-on-1 coaching on your work and role, independent of any install. They’re complementary; some clients do both.
Adjacent paths
Where this connects.
This engagement runs through the Lab.
Onboarding is a course you keep. Worksheets land where we read them before every call. When we’re done you hold the workbook, the certificate, and the method — not a slide deck about it.
See the Lab →Already have an Install? Just email us.
The retainer is for existing Personal Brain clients. Haven’t done the Install yet? Start with the Diagnostic Call. If you have, drop us a note and we’ll start the retainer the first of next month.
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