Walk the websites of a hundred marketing agencies and count how many show a price. You will run out of fingers before you run out of book-a-call buttons. The industry treats this as normal, even sophisticated. It is neither. It is a mechanism with a specific economic purpose, it has costs on both sides of the table, and the most interesting of those costs falls on the agency rather than the client. This piece is the argument for giving it up, and then the part that makes the argument cost us something: our own numbers, and the places where they lose.
What the discovery call is actually for
Scoping a marketing engagement is a real job and it does require a conversation. But notice how much of it can be done without one. The website is public. The ad library entries are public. Ten minutes in a keyword tool shows the size and competitiveness of the market. A page-speed test and a look at the analytics setup show the state of the foundations. Most of what determines which disciplines a business needs is visible from the outside before anyone picks up a phone.
What is not visible from the outside is the budget. So the friendly early questions — what is your revenue, how many people do you employ, what were you paying your last agency — are inputs to a number rather than to a plan. That is the mechanism, stated without drama: it is differential pricing, and the call is the instrument that measures willingness to pay. It is not fraud and it is not unusual; it is how a great many industries have always sold. It is simply worth naming, because a buyer who understands that the meeting is a measurement can prepare for it differently.
What opacity buys the seller
Three things, and none of them are for you. Margin capture: two clients with identical scopes can pay materially different fees and neither will ever know, so the same delivery cost produces different revenue depending on how the call went. Friction as a closing tool: once a buyer has sat through two calls and a proposal deck, sunk cost does work that the proposal itself does not have to do. And comparison blindness: if nobody publishes, nobody can be undercut on a spreadsheet, so an entire category ends up competing on charisma and deck design rather than on price and delivery.
The third is the one that shapes the industry rather than any individual deal. In a market where price is unknowable before a meeting, the winner of a competitive situation is usually the best presenter, not the best operator. That is a selection pressure, applied every day, on where agencies choose to invest. It is why so many firms have a better sales function than delivery function, and it is not a moral failing of the people involved. They are responding correctly to the incentive the market gave them.
If the price changes based on who is asking, it was never a price. It was an opening bid.
What opacity costs the buyer
The direct cost is the obvious one: you may have paid more than the next client for the same hours, and you have no way to find out. The indirect costs are larger and less discussed. The first is simply time. Comparing three agencies properly means three intake calls, three follow-ups and three proposal presentations, and the buyer learns whether a conversation was ever worth having only at the end of it. Several working days are spent discovering a number that could have been read in four seconds.
The second is that it poisons the relationship at the start. If the very first number you discussed was engineered rather than stated, the natural question is what else is calibrated to your reaction rather than to the facts — and the answer arrives later, in reporting. The third is that opacity hides the incentive structure inside the fee. A quietly negotiated percentage of media rewards the agency for growing your budget whether or not it grows your business, and without a standard rate you cannot tell whether your deal reflects your account or your negotiating skill. Fee structure is strategy: when it is hidden, the strategy is hidden with it, and you end up debating creative in meetings while the decision that actually governs behaviour was made before you arrived. What each fee model quietly rewards is the whole subject of what an agency actually costs.
What opacity costs the seller
This is the half of the argument that agencies rarely work through, and it is the reason publishing is a commercial decision rather than a moral one. Start with the arithmetic of the funnel. When the price is unknown, the first meeting has to carry two jobs at once: find out what the buyer needs, and find out whether the buyer can afford anything at all. A large share of those meetings end in the discovery that the answer to the second question was always no. Every one of them consumed senior time that produced nothing, and the cost of those meetings is loaded onto the clients who do sign — which is to say, opacity makes the service more expensive to sell, and therefore more expensive to buy.
Then there is the discount spiral. A price that is invented per deal is a price with no floor, because there is no published number to defend. The salesperson under pressure has one obvious lever, and pulling it costs nothing today and everything over a year, since a client acquired at a discount is a client whose margin was spent before the work began. Published prices remove the lever. That is uncomfortable in a specific deal and healthy across a portfolio.
There is a subtler cost too. Buyers who will not book a call to learn a price are invisible to an opaque agency — not lost, because they were never counted; simply absent from every metric the agency looks at. That group skews toward the buyers most worth having: the ones who have done this before, who evaluate on paper first, and who are unimpressed by a process designed to extract information from them. An opaque agency systematically never meets its most sophisticated prospects and has no way of knowing it.
How it changes who books a call
This is the practical effect, and it is bigger than the ethical one. A published price performs the qualification before the meeting rather than during it. Everyone who books has already read the number and accepted it, so the objection that consumes the most airtime in agency sales — can we afford this — is settled before anybody speaks. That single change converts a first call from a negotiation into a scoping session: which disciplines, in what order, with what measurement underneath.
The volume of enquiries falls. That is not a side effect to be apologised for, it is the mechanism working. What arrives instead is a smaller number of people who are further along, better informed, and much harder to sell to for the wrong reasons — because they can see the entire commercial shape of the relationship before the first meeting, including the terms and the refund window. An agency that finds this trade unattractive is telling you something accurate about where its revenue comes from.
The defence, taken seriously
The standard objection deserves a fair hearing: every business is different, so pricing must be custom. Scope genuinely is different. Pricing structure does not have to be. A plumber does not know what is behind your wall and still publishes an hourly rate. Law firms publish rate cards for work whose length nobody can predict. Software companies serve wildly different customers on three public tiers. Custom scope and public pricing coexist everywhere except in categories that profit from the fog.
The honest version of the objection is narrower and worth conceding. Some work really cannot be packaged: multi-location and franchise rollouts multiply per location, enterprise approval workflows are their own project, and very large media budgets change the management load rather than just the numbers in it. The correct response is to publish a floor and say plainly that above it the work is scoped, which is what our own Custom tier does at From $35,000 a month. "It depends" is a legitimate answer to a narrow question. It is not a legitimate answer to every question.
The part that makes publishing worth anything
Here is the strongest argument for publishing, and it is not the one about fairness. A published price list can be checked. It converts every marketing claim a company makes about its own value into an arithmetic statement that a sceptical buyer can verify with a calculator, and it makes the company live with the answer. The claim in question, made by nearly every agency that sells more than one service, is that bundling saves you money. Ours is published, so let us test it against ourselves.
The pricing page carries a band for what each of the ten disciplines typically costs bought on its own. Take the midpoint of each band, sort them cheapest first, and ask what a buyer would pay to assemble any given number of disciplines the cheapest way possible. Then put that next to the packaged tier covering the same count. This is the least flattering construction available — a real buyer choosing three disciplines might well pick three expensive ones, which would make the package look better — and it is the one a sceptical buyer would build anyway. These are the rows where our own packages are not a saving.
| Disciplines | Cheapest assembly | Package | Package price | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $1,500 | Starter | $3,500 | $2,000 more |
| 2 | $3,500 | Starter | $3,500 | identical |
| 3 | $5,900 | Growth | $7,500 | $1,600 more |
| 5 | $10,950 | Scale | $12,500 | $1,550 more |
Midpoints of our own published standalone bands, cheapest disciplines first. Not a third-party survey figure.
So the sentence "our bundles are cheaper" is false as stated, and we are not going to write it. What is true is narrower and more useful: bundling gets cheaper the more of the stack you take, it is roughly break-even in the middle of each band, and at the bottom of a band you are paying for something other than a discount. That something is real — one team accountable for the whole surface, one measurement layer every channel reports into, and no vendor able to blame another vendor — but it is coordination, not a price cut, and the two deserve to be argued separately. The full ladder, including the rows where the packages win, is in what an agency actually costs.
Two more things are published because publishing them is the only way the arithmetic above stays honest. There is a one-time onboarding fee of $1,500, charged on day one because that is when the onboarding work happens, and waived entirely at $5,000 a month and above. And there is a second commercial model for paid-media-led engagements — $3,500 base plus a tapering share of ad spend — because a business whose budget swings month to month is badly served by a flat fee. A price list that hides its fees is not a published price list; it is a headline.
What this does not prove
A published number settles one argument and leaves the important one open. Price tells you what an engagement costs. It does not tell you whether the person on your account has run an account like yours, whether the measurement underneath is sound enough for any of the numbers to mean anything, or whether the scope is the right scope. A cheap engagement pointed at the wrong discipline is more expensive than a dear one pointed at the right one. Transparency about price is the cheapest form of transparency there is, and it should be treated as the entry requirement rather than the achievement.
Which is why one disclosure belongs in the body of this article rather than in a footnote. CurrentAds has no paying clients yet. The single case study published on this site is an engagement with a company under common ownership with CurrentAds, published anonymised for exactly that reason; no revenue increase is attributable to the work, and none is claimed. Everything above is a commercial term you can hold us to and an arithmetic claim you can check, not evidence that the terms have already worked for somebody else. Publishing that is the same decision as publishing the price: it costs us the more flattering version of the story, and it is the only version that can be verified.
The test to run this quarter
If you are evaluating agencies, ask for the price in the first email, before agreeing to any call. Then read the shape of the reply rather than just its content. A number, or a range with the variables named, is one answer. A refusal to discuss money before a meeting is another. Neither is proof of anything by itself — there are good operators who have simply never published, and there are transparent price lists attached to poor delivery. But the answer tells you where a company has decided to put its effort, and over twelve months you will feel that decision every month. The same logic runs through everything else we publish, from the terms on the guarantee page to the rate for white label work. Transparency is cheaper to operate than trust theatre, and unlike trust theatre it compounds.
One more place the same test applies, and it is the one that costs real money to get wrong. A published price tells you what a company charges; the contract tells you what leaving costs, and the two are not the same disclosure. The clauses that decide that, with the fair version of each written beside the one to argue about, are set out in the contract clauses worth reading first.