What Digital Marketing Costs, Without the Theatre
There is no rate card here, and that is deliberate: a price quoted before scoping is a guess with a signature line. What this page does explain is how our pricing works, what moves the number, what the wider market charges, and the questions worth asking any agency, including us, before you sign anything.
Get a Scoped, Fixed QuoteFour rules that never change
A flat monthly fee, tied to scope
The fee is set by what the work actually involves: how many channels, how big the site or account, how much production is included. It does not move when your ad spend does.
Never a percentage of your ad spend
Percentage pricing pays the agency more when you spend more, whatever the spend returns. That is a conflict of interest dressed up as an industry standard, and we do not do it.
A written scope and a fixed number before anything starts
You see exactly what is included, what is not, and what it costs, in writing, before work begins. Changes to scope are agreed the same way.
You own everything, always
Your ad accounts, analytics, tracking configuration, content and website stay yours. If we part ways, you keep all of it and every login. Nothing is held hostage.
Three ways engagements are structured
Fixed-scope projects
A defined deliverable at a defined price: a tracking audit and rebuild, a website build, a one-time account restructure. You know the number before you say yes, and the project ends when the deliverable ships.
Tracking rebuilds, website builds, audits, migrations
Monthly retainers
Ongoing work that compounds: SEO, paid media management, content production. Scoped by channel count and workload, reviewed as the engagement grows or shrinks. The fee is flat month to month.
SEO programmes, paid media management, automation upkeep
Project first, retainer if earned
The most common path. A fixed project, usually the measurement layer, proves how we work. The retainer conversation happens after, with real findings on the table instead of promises.
Audit into management, site build into SEO
Why two businesses pay different prices for "SEO"
How many channels
SEO alone is a different workload from SEO plus paid media plus automation. Each channel adds scope, and you should only buy the ones the numbers support.
How competitive your market is
Ranking a niche B2B specialism and ranking a roofer in a major metro are different amounts of work. The market sets the effort required; we just price it honestly.
The size and state of what exists
A clean 20-page site costs less to work on than a 2,000-page store with a decade of accumulated decisions. Same for ad accounts.
Who executes
If your team writes the content and makes the site changes, the fee reflects that. If we produce everything, it reflects that instead. Both models work; mixing them up is what fails.
The budget arithmetic itself, what a channel has to return to be worth running, is worked through in how much to spend on Google Ads.
What the wider market charges
Broad ranges, so you can sanity-check any proposal, including ours. These describe what US agencies commonly charge across small and mid-market engagements; they are context, not our quote. Your fixed number comes after scoping, in writing.
A proposal far below these ranges is usually buying you a login and a monthly PDF. Far above them, it should come with a very specific explanation of why.
Questions to ask any agency about money
- Is the fee flat, or a percentage of my ad spend? If a percentage, what stops you recommending a bigger budget?
- Do I own the ad accounts, the analytics and the tracking, and do I keep them if I leave?
- What exactly is in scope each month, in writing?
- What does your reporting show: platform metrics, or leads and revenue?
- What happens in month one? If the answer is not something like an audit of the measurement, ask why.
We will answer all five on the first call, unprompted. The services these questions apply to are laid out under what we do.
Common questions about pricing
Why is there no price list on this page?
Because a price list would be a guess dressed up as a promise. The honest inputs, your market, your site, your account, what you want done and who executes, change the number several-fold in either direction. What we commit to instead: a written scope and a fixed price before anything starts, and a free assessment first so the proposal is built on your actual situation rather than a package tier.
What is wrong with percentage-of-spend pricing?
It ties the agency’s revenue to your budget instead of your results. Under that model, recommending you cut a wasteful budget in half costs the agency money, and recommending an increase pays them regardless of what it returns. Most agencies under that model are honest anyway, but the incentive points the wrong direction, and pricing structures work best when nobody has to be heroic to act in your interest.
Do you mark up ad spend or run it through your accounts?
No. Your ad spend goes on your card, in your ad accounts, at whatever Google or Meta actually charge. Our fee is our fee, itemised separately. Running client spend through agency accounts obscures the true media cost and makes leaving painful, which is usually the point of the arrangement.
What is a sensible minimum budget to start with?
It depends on the channel and your market, and there genuinely is a floor below which the money is wasted: paid search needs enough conversion volume to learn from, and SEO needs enough work to outrun the market. If your budget sits below the floor for a channel, we will say so in the assessment and point at what the money would do better, including nothing for now. Taking an engagement doomed by its budget helps nobody.
What do we get before paying anything?
The free assessment: we look at your site, your tracking and, where you grant access, your ad account, and come back with what we found and what we would do about it. You keep the findings whether or not you hire us. It is genuinely useful on its own, and it is also how we scope honestly instead of quoting blind.
Want an actual number?
Book a free assessment. You get the findings and a scoped, fixed quote, and no obligation to take either further.