Predictable monthly cost. Capped risk exposure. Senior expertise on call. No internal hiring overhead. Two parallel retainer ladders — Compliance Officer for senior advisory, Operational Office for back-office execution. Buy one, the other, or both bundled for 12% off the combined rate.
A retainer turns compliance from an unpredictable line item into a managed function — sized to your operation, billed at a fixed monthly rate, with no hourly billing surprises. Your team stops scrambling to manage compliance between everything else; senior expertise is on call.
The architecture splits into two ladders that run beside each other, not on top. Compliance Officer covers advisory — senior thinking, citation response, inspection preparation, strategic oversight. Operational Office covers execution — the daily keyboard work of METRC, manifest creation, batch records, inventory reconciliation. A client can buy one ladder, the other, or both. Operators who buy both get a 12% discount on the combined monthly retainer.
Strategic oversight, citation response, inspection prep. Four tiers that ascend by license count and cadence. The right tier matches your portfolio's surface area, not your willingness to spend.
Quarterly review of your operation. Weekly digest of relevant DCC enforcement actions. Two hours of Q&A access per month. Citation response is triage only — if a citation hits, we triage and scope the deeper work as a fixed-fee Project.
Monthly strategy call. Monthly METRC snapshot review. Minor SOP revisions included. Citation response capped at 5 hours per month — beyond that scopes as a fixed-fee Project. The most common starting tier for operators in active enforcement pain after a Diagnostic.
Weekly cadence with a dedicated point of contact. METRC reviewed bi-weekly. SOPs actively maintained. Citation response up to 15 hours per month. Quarterly mock audits. Onsite presence available, quoted case-by-case based on location and scope.
The full outsourced Director of Compliance function. Weekly executive reporting to ownership. Real-time citation alerts on portfolio matches. Unlimited citation response within reasonable use. Monthly mock audits rotating across sites. Inspection-day onsite presence included.
The Embedded tier deliberately stops just below the buy-vs-build inflection point. A full-time Director of Compliance in California cannabis is $200K–$280K all-in, before benefits and recruiting cost. At $15K/mo with no recruiting risk, no benefits, and no single-point-of-failure exposure, the math works.
Daily METRC entry. Manifest creation. Batch records. Inventory reconciliation. Trained operations specialists, not senior consultant time — which is what keeps these tiers accessible to single-license and small operators. Buy this on its own if you have advisory coverage internally, or pair it with a Compliance Officer tier and take the bundle discount.
Up to 10 hours per month, ad-hoc. The right answer when you already have a compliance person doing daily work and just need coverage for vacations, surge periods, or a second set of eyes on a complex week. Not designed for daily use — that's deliberate.
Up to 30 hours per month — roughly an hour a day. Sized for a single small license with low daily transaction volume: a small cultivator with one harvest cycle, a low-throughput distributor. The natural starter tier for an operator who's nervous about compliance but doesn't need a lot of hours.
Up to 60 hours per month — two-and-a-half to three hours per business day. Single-license operators at meaningful volume, or two small licenses sharing the budget. Production records, batch records, and inventory adjustments included. Daily compliance log delivered to ownership.
Up to 100 hours per month — roughly five hours per business day. Multi-license operators and microbusinesses outsourcing the daily compliance function entirely. Designated Account Manager (DAM) coverage handled by Freed Up's team. Effectively a full-time-equivalent compliance ops role at a fraction of the loaded cost of hiring.
The two retainers do different work. Officer-tier hours are senior advisory; Office-tier hours are execution. A multi-license operator who wants both senior strategic oversight and someone doing the daily keyboard work is the natural buyer for the bundle. The 12% reflects shared overhead — one onboarding, one billing relationship, one engagement narrative.
A multi-license operator takes the Weekly Compliance Officer tier ($9,000/mo) plus the Daily Operational Office tier ($6,500/mo). Combined retainer: $15,500/mo. With the 12% bundle discount: $13,640/mo. The same operator hiring a full-time compliance officer plus a compliance specialist would pay roughly $25K–$35K/mo all-in once benefits, payroll, and recruiting cost are factored in.
The bundle discount applies to the recurring monthly retainer only. It doesn't stack on Project pricing or the Diagnostic fee. If you ran a Diagnostic first, the $5,000 Diagnostic credit still applies on top.
Most operators land on the right tier within a single 20-minute call. We ask about your license count, your current pain points, your team's internal coverage, and your inspection history. Then we tell you which tier fits — or whether a Project would make more sense as the first move.