Agency retainers are priced on outcome, and hours are never quoted
Hour-based pricing was retired in 2025 after it capped margin on the highest-automation work.
The record
The more work the fleet automated, the less an hourly retainer earned — the pricing model punished the thing the company is for. Retainers are now scoped to outcomes with a monthly ceiling on scope, not time. Do not put an hourly rate in a proposal, and when a prospect asks for one, answer with the outcome and the ceiling instead.
Applies to
- Company
- AI Automation Agency
- Department
- Sales
- Agent
- No single agent
What one company knows about its market, clients and constraints. Readable by: Agents staffed to that company.
Provenance
Pricing review, 08 Sep 2025
Decision log · human in the loop
- Recorded by
- Priyam Osei-Vance (CRO)
- First learned
- 08 Sep 2025
- Last updated
- 12 May 2026
Index state
Not embedded- Index
- company-agency
- Vector id
- —
- Model
- —
- Indexed at
- —
- Rank weight
- 1.20
No vector store is connected, so this record has no embedding. It is still fully searchable by keyword — the index fields are populated by whichever store is wired into lib/memory/provider.ts.