pricing 22 Jul 2026 4 min read
Why we charge a flat fee, not a percentage of spend
Percentage-of-spend is the default in paid media, and it quietly points the agency at the wrong target. Here is the incentive it creates, and what we do instead.
What percentage-of-spend actually rewards
If your agency takes a cut of your media budget, the agency’s revenue goes up when your spend goes up. Not when your return goes up. Those two things usually move together, but not always, and the moments they diverge are exactly the moments that matter: a channel is fatiguing, the efficient budget has been found, the honest recommendation is to spend less.
Under a percentage model, “spend less” is the one recommendation the pricing punishes. We would rather not build that conflict into the relationship at all.
The eight-person production function
Traditional agency pricing exists to cover a traditional agency’s cost: an account director, a media planner, a copywriter, a designer, an analyst, a project manager. That headcount is real, and someone has to pay for it, so the fee is a percentage of spend plus billable hours on top.
Our execution is run by agents, with operators at the gate. We do not carry that eight-person salary line, so we do not need to price to cover it. That is the whole trick. If you want the longer version of why the agents change the economics, it is in what agentic-native actually means.
A flat fee plus a performance share
So the pricing is simple: one flat monthly retainer, plus a share tied to performance. No percentage of your ad spend, no billable-hour theatre, no surprise invoices. Your media budget is yours; we charge for running it well.
We would rather be paid to grow the business than to spend the budget.
The performance share is the part that keeps us honest in the other direction. It means we carry some of the outcome with you, so pausing a fatigued campaign and reallocating to a winner is aligned with our own upside, not against it.
What you can check
Pricing claims are easy to make, so the model is built to be verifiable rather than trusted:
- One line item. The fee is a fixed number you agreed to, not a moving percentage you reconcile later.
- Month to month. No lock-in. If the model is not working, you leave.
- A ledger every Friday. What ran, what changed, what it returned, in numbers. If the spend went up, you can see whether the return did too.
If percentage-of-spend has been quietly costing you, a fifteen-minute call is the fastest way to compare. No pitch, no slides.
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