Most design subscription services brag about volume. Unlimited requests. Unlimited revisions. A team of ten designers ready to take on whatever you throw at them. The pitch is built around the idea that more is better, and the deeper you read into how these services actually work, the more obvious it becomes that the volume promise is mostly marketing.
The Workbench is the model M13 was built around, and it goes the other direction. Instead of bragging about how many things we can have in motion at once, we built a system that protects quality by limiting how much work is active at any given time. You can submit as many requests as you want. The queue is unlimited. But we work on two projects at a time, in focused blocks, until each one is genuinely done before moving to the next.
This post explains why we built it that way, how it works in practice, what a typical week looks like for a client on the Workbench, and where the model fits (and doesn’t fit) for different kinds of businesses. If you’ve been reading any of the M13 vs competitor comparisons and wondered what the Workbench actually means in day-to-day terms, this is the post.
We’ll cover:
- The problem with most design subscription models
- What the Workbench is in plain language
- Why we capped active work at two projects
- How submissions and the queue work in practice
- A typical week on the Workbench
- What the model isn’t built for
- Who it works best for
Let’s get into it.
The problem with most design subscription models
The unlimited design subscription category exists for good reasons. Hiring a freelancer is unpredictable. Hiring an in-house designer is expensive. Working with a traditional agency is slow and project-scoped in ways that don’t fit how marketing actually moves. The subscription model solves all three problems. You get predictable monthly billing, fast turnaround, and unlimited requests at a price that fits a small business budget.
The trade-off, which most services quietly bury in their fine print, is that “unlimited” is a marketing term, not a production reality.
There are three common ways services handle this gap.
The queue model. You submit as many requests as you want, but only one is actively being worked on at a time. Everything else waits. The queue moves at whatever pace your assigned designer can manage, which is usually one request per business day for simple work and several days for anything complex. If you submit ten requests on Monday, the tenth one starts on the second Tuesday. “Unlimited” means unlimited submissions, not unlimited progress.
The daily output model. A variation on the queue model where the service guarantees a certain amount of completed work each business day. Some services will deliver one design per day. Others promise two or three. The daily output framing is more honest than pure “unlimited” language, but it still leads to the same workflow: a steady stream of small assets rather than focused attention on bigger projects.
The hourly model. Used by some services that have moved away from flat-rate “unlimited” entirely. You buy daily creative hours and the designer works on whatever you’ve prioritized for that day. Two hours per day, four hours per day, eight hours per day. The math is more transparent than the queue or daily output models, but the trade-off is that you’re now budgeting capacity rather than projects, and the entry price tends to be significantly higher.
All three models have legitimate use cases. For marketing teams running a constant stream of small, similar assets (daily ad creative variants, weekly social posts, monthly campaign refreshes), they work fine. The volume framing matches the actual workflow.
For everyone else, the volume framing creates a gap between what gets sold and what gets delivered.
A small business owner who needs a brand identity, a website, and a few months of marketing collateral isn’t running a constant stream of small similar assets. They’re running a few important projects that each deserve focused attention. When that buyer signs up for an unlimited design subscription and submits five requests in their first week, they expect those five projects to make real progress. What they actually get is project number one moving forward, four projects waiting, and a slow drip of work that takes weeks longer than they planned for.
The volume framing isn’t dishonest, exactly. It’s just optimized for a different kind of buyer than the one who usually needs help.
What the Workbench is
The Workbench is M13’s solution to that gap. Here’s how it works in plain language.
You subscribe to one of our plans. Once you’re on board, you can submit as many design requests as you want through your client portal. There’s no monthly cap on submissions. There’s no penalty for queuing up everything you can think of in your first week. We want your full list, because the more we know about what you’re trying to do, the better we can prioritize the work.
Out of everything you’ve submitted, we work on two projects at a time. Two active slots. Both get focused attention. We don’t move to the next project until one of the active two is genuinely complete.
The rest of your queue waits in line, sorted by priority. We’ll work with you on what comes next, and you can re-prioritize the queue whenever you want. As soon as one of the active slots opens up (because a project is finished and approved), the next item in the queue moves into that slot and we start working on it.
That’s the entire model. Two slots in motion, unlimited queue, focused attention until each project is done before moving on.
It sounds simple because it is simple. The whole point is that the design relationship works the way you intuitively expect it to, without the queue chaos that other models create.
Why we capped active work at two projects
The obvious question is: why two? Why not three, or four, or six? Other services handle more concurrent work and they seem to manage. Why is two the right number?
The honest answer is that we tested it. M13 started with a flexible model where active work scaled based on what made sense for each client. What we learned over time is that quality starts dropping noticeably once active project count goes above two. Not a little bit. A lot.
Here’s what happens at three or more active projects.
Context-switching costs become real. Every time you move from one project to another, there’s a setup cost. You have to remember where you left off, reload the brand context, get back into the headspace of the work. With two active projects, that context-switching is manageable. With three or four, it starts to dominate the day, and the time spent actually moving work forward shrinks.
Brand consistency starts to slip. When you’re working on multiple projects for the same client at the same time, small inconsistencies creep in. A color used in one asset that’s slightly off from the same color in another. A typographic treatment that drifted between the homepage hero and the social card. None of these are catastrophic on their own, but they compound, and they undermine the entire reason brand work matters.
Quality of attention drops. Designers are humans, not machines. When you’re juggling four projects, each one gets about a quarter of your attention. The decisions get faster, the iteration loops get shorter, and the work gets more “good enough” and less “actually good.” That’s the difference that separates work you’re proud to ship from work you’re tired of looking at.
Communication becomes friction. With two active projects, there’s space to actually talk with the client about each one. With four, the communication starts feeling like overhead, and the natural temptation is to make decisions without checking in. That’s how scope creep happens, how mismatches between what was asked for and what got delivered show up at the worst possible moment.
Two is the number where focused attention is still possible and where the relationship can stay genuinely collaborative. It’s not a magic constant. Different services with different team structures might land on different numbers. But for a founder-led model where the same person is overseeing every project from kickoff to delivery, two is what works.
The tradeoff is that we can’t move twenty projects simultaneously the way an enterprise creative-as-a-service team can. We’re not built for that. What we’re built for is making sure that the projects we are moving get the attention they deserve.
How submissions and the queue work in practice
The mechanics are intentionally simple. Here’s the actual workflow.
Submitting a request. When you sign up, you get access to a client portal where you can submit design requests. Each request includes a title, a description of what you need, any reference materials or brand assets, and any deadline context. The more detail you provide up front, the faster the project moves once it hits an active slot, but you don’t need a perfect brief. We’ll ask questions if anything’s unclear.
The queue. Every submission lands in your queue, which is just a prioritized list of everything you’ve asked for. The two highest-priority items are the active slots. Everything else is waiting in order. You can re-prioritize the queue at any time, either through the portal or by telling us directly. If something becomes urgent, it moves up. If something can wait, it moves down.
Active work. Once a project hits an active slot, we start working on it. For most projects, you’ll get a first draft within a few business days. Then you review, give feedback, and we iterate. Revisions are unlimited. We keep working on the project until you’re satisfied with it, and only then do we mark it complete and move the next item from the queue into the open slot.
Communication. All client communication runs through the portal, with the founder directly involved in every conversation. There’s no project manager layer between you and the work. If you have a question, you ask. If we have a question, we ask. The relationship is direct and it stays that way through the life of the project.
Approval and handoff. When a project is done, we deliver the final files (Adobe source files, Canva templates if requested, print-ready PDFs, web-ready images, Figma files for digital projects, whatever the project calls for). You confirm everything looks right. We mark it complete. The next queue item moves into the open slot and we start the cycle again.
That’s the whole loop. Submit, queue, active, deliver, complete, next. No fancy mechanics, no platform games, no surprises.
A typical week on the Workbench
To make this concrete, here’s what a typical week looks like for a small business client on the M13 DaaS plan.
Monday morning. You log into the portal and see two projects in the active slots: a new sales one-pager that’s been in progress for three days, and a social media content set for the week. You also see eight items in the queue, including a brand refresh you’ve been thinking about, a few ad creative variants for an upcoming campaign, and a presentation template for your sales team.
The sales one-pager is in the second round of revisions. We’ve made the changes you asked for last Friday and there’s a new draft waiting for your review. You approve it with one small note about the headline. We make the edit and send the final files within an hour. The one-pager is done.
That open slot now pulls the next item from your queue. You’d flagged the brand refresh as a higher priority a few days ago, so that becomes the new active project. We confirm the scope and timeline with you and start work that afternoon.
Tuesday and Wednesday. Both active projects are moving. The social media content set gets a draft delivered Tuesday afternoon for your review. The brand refresh is in the discovery phase: we’re reviewing your existing brand, asking questions about what’s working and what isn’t, and putting together initial concepts.
You spot a typo on one of the social posts and flag it. We fix it within the hour. You also realize you forgot to add a Q3 webinar promo to your queue. You submit it through the portal. It joins the queue at whatever priority you set.
Thursday. The social media content set is done. You’ve approved everything and the final files are delivered. The brand refresh is in concept review and we’re presenting three directions for you to react to.
The open slot pulls the next queued item. Your Q3 webinar promo was marked urgent, so it jumps the line and becomes active. We start working on it that afternoon.
Friday. Brand refresh is in iteration on the direction you picked. Webinar promo first draft is delivered. You review both, give feedback on each, and head into the weekend with both projects actively moving.
That’s a typical week. Two projects in motion at all times. A few items move from the queue into active slots as completed work clears out. Communication is direct and ongoing. Nothing gets stuck because no one’s paying attention.
What happens when you submit ten things at once
This is the most common question we get from buyers comparing the Workbench to high-volume models. If we work on two projects at a time, what happens when you have ten urgent things you need designed this week?
The honest answer is that two projects at a time isn’t slower than the alternatives, even when the queue is long. Here’s why.
In a queue model that runs one active project at a time, ten projects take ten cycles to clear. Each cycle involves a first draft, some revisions, and approval. If each cycle averages two to three business days, ten projects clear in twenty to thirty business days. That’s four to six weeks for the queue to fully empty.
On the Workbench with two active slots, those same ten projects clear roughly twice as fast in real time. Two cycles run in parallel rather than one, so the math compresses. Ten projects with two-to-three day cycles takes ten to fifteen business days, or two to three weeks.
For comparison, an “unlimited daily output” model that promises one or two completed deliverables per business day delivers similar throughput on small assets but slows dramatically on bigger projects. A daily output model is great if every request is a single social graphic. It struggles when one of your requests is a brand refresh that takes a week of focused attention to get right.
The Workbench is built around the assumption that not every request is the same size. Some are quick. Some take longer. We adapt the active slots to fit the actual work, and the throughput stays consistent because focused attention compounds. A project that gets two slots of focused attention finishes faster than the same project getting fragmented attention across four or five active workflows.
When you genuinely need ten things done in a week, the question isn’t really “how many concurrent slots can your service handle.” It’s “how fast does each cycle move.” The Workbench moves cycles fast because focused attention is faster than divided attention, and that’s where the throughput actually comes from.
What the Workbench isn’t built for
We try to be honest about where this model fits and where it doesn’t. There are a few situations where the Workbench isn’t the right call, and you should know about them up front.
You need to fire twenty campaigns into a queue and have them all moving at once. If your business runs constant high-volume marketing production with twenty or more parallel workflows happening at any given moment, the Workbench’s two-slot focus isn’t going to keep up. Services like Superside that handle 80 to 200+ creative hours per month with multiple designers per account are built for that scale, and we’d point you to them instead of pretending we can match what they do.
You need 24/5 dedicated customer support. M13 is founder-led. Communication runs through the portal during Mountain Time business hours. We’re responsive within those hours and the founder is directly accessible, but we don’t have a 24-hour support team the way a larger service does. If your team operates across multiple time zones and needs immediate response at any hour, that’s a real gap.
You need a guaranteed 24-hour first draft on every request. Some services market 24-hour first draft turnaround as a default. The Workbench delivers first drafts faster on simple projects and slower on complex ones, depending on what the work actually requires. We don’t promise 24-hour drafts on every request because we’d rather under-promise and deliver work that’s worth the wait.
You want a service where you never have to think about prioritization. The Workbench gives you control over your queue, which means you have to make decisions about what comes next. For most clients, this is a feature rather than a bug. But if you’d rather hand off your entire workflow and never think about ordering or priorities, a higher-touch service with a dedicated project manager handling those decisions might fit better.
These aren’t deal-breakers for most small and mid-sized businesses, but they’re real, and we’d rather flag them up front than have the mismatch show up after you’ve signed up.
Who the Workbench works best for
The Workbench is built for a specific kind of buyer. If you recognize yourself in the list below, this is the model for you.
Small and mid-sized businesses with mixed design needs. Brand work, marketing collateral, social graphics, presentations, the occasional larger project. Not constant high-volume production, but a steady stream of work that includes both quick assets and bigger projects.
Businesses that value quality over throughput. If “more designs per month” isn’t your top priority, and “make sure each design is genuinely good” matters more, the Workbench is built around your priorities rather than against them.
Founders and operators who want a direct relationship. No project manager layer. No ticket queue. The same person you talked to in your kickoff call is the person overseeing your work every week. If you want a real relationship with your design partner, the founder-led model gives you that directly.
Canadian businesses that want a Canadian partner. M13 is based in Alberta, Canada. Same time zones as most of North America, same currency, same regulatory context. We understand CASL and Canadian tax considerations and we don’t pretend otherwise.
Buyers who eventually need website work. The Workbench scales into website development as an add-on. WordPress with Bricks Builder is our primary stack, and we also build custom apps in Next.js and React for clients who need something more bespoke. If you start with the DaaS plan and your business grows into needing a website, the same partner handles both.
Buyers who want one partner that grows with them. The DaaS plan is the foundation. Video production, social media management, and website development extend from it as add-ons or higher-tier plans. The relationship grows as your business does, instead of forcing you to find a new vendor every time your needs change.
If most of those describe you, the Workbench is probably the right fit. If none of them do, one of the other design subscription services we’ve compared might be a better match, and we’d rather point you to the right answer than try to convince you we’re it.
Frequently asked questions
How many design requests can I submit per month?
Unlimited. There’s no monthly cap on submissions. You can queue up as much work as you want and we’ll prioritize it together. The two active slots are the constraint on how much work is in motion at once, not how much work you can submit.
What if I need a project done in a hurry?
Tell us. The queue is yours to prioritize, and urgent work moves to the front. If something is genuinely time-sensitive, it can become an active slot the same day you submit it. Most clients have at least one rush project a month and the model handles it without drama.
Can I have more than two active projects if I need to?
The standard Workbench is two active slots. For clients with consistent higher-volume needs, we can build custom packages that include additional capacity. The reason we don’t make that the default is that quality drops when active project count goes above two for most clients. If you genuinely need more concurrent capacity, let’s talk about whether a custom package or a different service entirely is the better fit.
Who actually does the work on my projects?
Lyndon, the founder, oversees every project and is your direct point of contact. The actual production work is handled by Lyndon plus the production capacity that supports the Workbench. The accountability stays with the founder regardless of who’s executing on a given step, and the same person is involved in your work from kickoff to delivery.
How is this different from “unlimited” services?
“Unlimited” services market unlimited submissions, but the actual work moves through a queue (or hourly capacity) one piece at a time per designer. The Workbench is honest about the constraint up front: two active projects in motion, with the queue waiting behind them. The math of how much work gets done per month is similar across most subscription models. The difference is whether the service is honest about how the throughput actually works.
Can I pause my Workbench subscription?
Pause is available on request. M13 doesn’t have a self-serve pause button the way some services do, but if your needs slow down or you have a quiet stretch coming, we’ll work something out. The subscription is monthly with no long-term contract, so you can also simply cancel and resume later if that’s easier.
Does the Workbench include website work?
The DaaS plan covers graphic design and brand work. Website development is available as an add-on or as part of the Website plan ($999/mo). M13’s primary web stack is WordPress with Bricks Builder, and we also build custom apps in Next.js and React for clients who need something more bespoke. If you know up front that you’ll need both design and website work, we’ll build a custom package.
Can I see the queue and active projects in real time?
Yes. The client portal shows every project in the queue, the two active slots, and the status of each one. You can re-prioritize, add new requests, and check progress at any time. The whole point of the model is that there are no surprises, so the workflow is fully transparent.
Ready to talk?
If the Workbench sounds like the model you’ve been looking for, book a discovery call and we’ll have a real conversation about your project. We’ll talk through what you actually need, whether the Workbench is the right fit, and what the relationship would look like in practice.
If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you. There are seven other design subscription services we’ve compared and one of them is probably a better match. We’d rather point you to the right answer than try to convince you we’re it.
The Workbench was built for a specific kind of buyer. If that’s you, let’s talk.
Related reading:
- Best Design Subscription Services in 2026: A Side-by-Side Comparison
- Design Pickle vs Mountain Thirteen: A Founder-Led Alternative for 2026
- DesignJoy vs Mountain Thirteen: A Founder-Led Alternative at a Different Price Point
- Kimp vs Mountain Thirteen: Two Canadian Design Subscription Studios Compared
- Penji vs Mountain Thirteen: A Founder-Led Alternative for SMBs in 2026
- ManyPixels vs Mountain Thirteen: Daily Output vs Workbench Model
- Reel Unlimited vs Mountain Thirteen: Direct Partnership vs White-Label Design
- Superside vs Mountain Thirteen: Enterprise Scale vs SMB-Friendly Subscription