Retainer, Project or Pay-on-Results: Which Pricing Model Is Quietly Working Against You?

Most articles on this topic are written to coach agencies on how to price, not to help you judge an offer. This one is the other way around.

The retainer (a monthly fee)

You pay a set amount each month for ongoing work. In Australia that tends to run from about $1,500 to $6,000 a month for a small to medium business, with bigger multi-channel programs at $6,000 to $15,000 and up.

What it's good at: continuity, and a provider who stays across your account over time. Where it points the incentive: you pay for effort whether or not it produces results, so the provider's natural goal is to keep you subscribed. That's fine when the work is good and measured. It goes wrong when the monthly fee buys activity nobody's tying back to revenue. The things to check are what's actually included at your tier, and whether there's a lock-in.

The project fee (a one-off)

You pay a fixed price for a defined piece of work. Setup or onboarding fees commonly run from a few hundred dollars up to around $2,000, a proper website is realistically $12,000 to $25,000, and individual landing pages can be charged separately at up to around $1,000 each.

What it's good at: a clear scope and a clear cost, with no ongoing commitment. Where it falls short: the provider is paid on delivery, not on whether the thing works, and a one-off asset with nothing driving traffic to it just sits there. A beautiful website is still a project fee well spent only if something is built to feed it.

Pay-on-results (performance)

Here the provider's pay is tied to outcomes. It comes in a few forms: pay per lead (roughly $50 to $100 for lower-competition work, up to $200 to $500 for high-value fields), pay per appointment (around $40 to $220 per booked call), or commission and revenue share (often something like 5 to 10 percent).

What it's good at: it shifts real risk onto the provider, which is exactly what a burned buyer wants. The catches are worth knowing. When someone is paid per lead or appointment, they're motivated to push volume, so you can end up with a full calendar and an empty pipeline unless “qualified” is defined in writing first. When pay depends on which sales they can claim, expect arguments about attribution. And watch for “results” language wrapped around an arrangement that quietly protects the agency's fee anyway, which isn't performance pricing at all. It's also rarer than the hype suggests: among large advertisers, performance-based pay has actually shrunk over the last decade. A provider who genuinely pays on results has to be selective about who they take on, because they can only carry that risk for clients they're confident about.

Base plus bonus

A normal fee with a performance bonus on top. This is the most common form at the big end of town, and the whole argument usually comes down to how the bonus is measured. Get that definition clear and in writing, or it becomes the thing you fight about later.

The one sum that cuts through all of it

Whatever the model, run this. Take the cost and divide it by what one new client is worth to you over their lifetime. That tells you how many clients the spend has to bring in just to break even. If a client is worth $5,000 to you and an arrangement costs $4,000 a month, it has to produce roughly one new client a month to wash its face, and more than that to be worth doing. This single sum settles most pricing debates. A high fee that reliably brings five clients is cheap. A low fee that brings none is the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.

The rough rule of thumb: a project fee for a defined one-off, a retainer for ongoing work you'll measure, performance pricing when a provider is confident enough to carry the risk, and base-plus-bonus once you're big enough for it to matter.

How I price

I build and run the whole connected system, and you don't pay my management fee until it has delivered an agreed number of qualified appointments. You fund your own ad spend, paid straight to the platform, and I say that plainly next to the word free. It's a performance model, which is exactly why I qualify who I take on, and why every promise travels with its mechanics in writing rather than as a bare headline.

If you're weighing up an offer and you're not sure which model it really is, or where its incentives point, bring it to a free teardown. I'll read it with you and tell you honestly where the risk sits. No pitch, and you keep what we work out.