Why We Don't Charge a Percentage of Your Ad Spend

The standard agency fee is 10–20% of what you spend on ads. We charge a flat monthly fee and take nothing on your media budget. That's unusual enough that people ask about it on almost every call, so here's the reasoning — including what's wrong with our version.

Short answer: the percentage model means the advice that makes us the most money and the advice that's best for you are frequently different pieces of advice. We'd rather not be in that position.

What the percentage model actually does

Say you're spending $5,000 a month on Google Ads with an agency charging 15%. That's $750 to them.

Now consider three recommendations they could make:

Recommendation	Effect on you	Effect on their revenue
"Increase to $8,000"	Maybe right, maybe not	+$450/month
"Your cost per lead is climbing — pull back to $3,500"	Probably right	−$225/month
"Stop advertising and fix your callback times first"	Sometimes exactly right	−$750/month

Every honest recommendation in that table costs them money. That doesn't make percentage-based agencies dishonest — most are perfectly straight, and plenty will tell you to cut spend. It means they have to be straight against their own compensation, every month, forever.

That's a lot to ask of a structure when you could just not build it that way.

The recommendation that's hardest to make

The one we make most: stop, and fix your follow-up first.

A meaningful share of the businesses that come to us don't have a traffic problem. They have leads arriving and waiting hours for a callback, or arriving after 5pm and reaching voicemail. Sending more paid traffic into that is the most expensive possible way to discover it.

Under a percentage model, "spend nothing for six weeks while we fix your intake" is a recommendation that reduces the agency's income to zero on that account. Under a flat fee it's just Tuesday.

We'd like to say we'd make that call either way. We're just glad we don't have to find out.

What we do instead

A flat monthly fee by tier — $1,500, $3,750 or $6,500 — published on the pricing page rather than revealed on a call. Your media budget goes entirely to the platform. If your spend triples, our fee doesn't move.

Scope changes the fee, not spend: +$650 per additional channel, +$450 per additional location, +$300 per service line. Those track the actual work, which is what a fee should do.

The honest downside of our model

A flat fee has a real problem in the other direction, and pretending otherwise would be the same trick with different arithmetic.

A percentage model scales the agency's revenue with the account's complexity automatically. A $50,000/month spend genuinely is more work than a $3,000 one — more campaigns, more analysis, higher stakes on every decision. A flat fee doesn't capture that on its own.

Our answer is the scope add-ons, which handle most of it, plus the fact that we work with businesses doing $500K to $10M. At much larger spend levels, a percentage arrangement might genuinely be a fairer deal for both parties. We're not claiming our structure is right for every agency — we're claiming it's right for the businesses we work with.

The other downside: a flat fee means a client spending very little pays the same as one spending a lot at the same tier. That's why we publish media minimums and say plainly when a business is too small for us. The DIY playbook is free and will serve some readers better than we would.

Where we do have a conflict

We're not conflict-free and we don't claim to be.

We earn affiliate commissions on some software links, including a recurring 40% on GoHighLevel — a tool we deploy for clients. That's a real conflict of interest and it's why how we make money exists as its own page, why every software page discloses at the top, and why we publish criticism of tools that pay us well.

We're also an agency writing about whether you need an agency, which is not a neutral position. The best defence we can offer is the free guides that tell you how to do it yourself.

Judge the disclosures on whether they're specific. Vague ones are decoration.

Is a percentage always wrong?

No — and it's worth saying that rather than pretending the whole industry is crooked.

At large spend levels, with a sophisticated advertiser who's watching closely, a percentage can align both parties around growth and is simple to administer. The model has a genuine logic.

It's a poor fit for a $2M service business that isn't watching closely, where the agency's incentive quietly points one direction and nobody notices for a year.

If you're evaluating agencies, the question worth asking isn't "do you charge a percentage." It's "what's the last thing you told a client to stop spending money on, and what did it cost you?" The answer tells you more than any fee structure.