Most agencies will not put a number on a page. You have to book a call, sit through a
pitch, and only then find out whether you were ever in the right range. That wastes your
time and ours, so here are the numbers.
Three things drive what you will pay: the pricing model, your monthly ad spend, and
how much of the work you are handing over.
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The two pricing models, and when each is used
Almost every agency prices one of two ways.
Percentage of ad spend. You pay a share of what you spend on media. It scales
automatically, which suits accounts whose budgets move a lot month to month. The obvious
tension is that it pays the agency more to spend more, which is not always the same as
performing better.
The percentage should fall as your spend rises. Running a $250,000 account is not ten times
the work of running a $25,000 one, and a rate card that holds the same percentage at every
level is charging you for a workload that is not there.
Ours is under 5%, and it improves as you scale. Above $100,000 a month in spend it is
comfortably under 5%. It also depends on how many channels you are running, because each
additional channel is real additional work in a way that additional spend on one channel is
not.
Why that is so far below the industry’s traditional 15% is a longer argument, and we made it
separately: why the 15% agency fee is dead.
Flat monthly retainer. A fixed fee for a defined scope. Predictable, easier to budget,
and it decouples the fee from spend, so nobody is incentivised to inflate budgets. The
tension is the reverse: if your spend grows sharply, scope has to be renegotiated.
Some engagements blend the two: a retainer floor plus a percentage above a spend threshold.
What it actually costs
A serious, performance-focused agency generally starts around $5,000 a month. Below
that you are almost always looking at small niche shops.
That is not automatically wrong, and for some businesses it is the right call. But it is
worth understanding what the difference usually is, because it is rarely efficiency. Creative
strategy is a judgment discipline: the value is concentrated in whoever decides what to test
and reads the result. A materially cheaper retainer normally means that decision is being
made by someone with fewer accounts behind them.
Ours starts at $7,500 a month for creative plus growth marketing.
| Your monthly ad spend | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Under $50,000 | Below our floor. The arithmetic is in the next section, and it is not a judgement about your business. |
| $50,000 – $100,000 | Retainer-based, starting at $7,500/month |
| $100,000+ | Percentage-based, under 5%, improving as spend and channel count grow |
We publish this because the alternative wastes everyone’s time. If this is far outside your
range, you have just saved yourself three calls, and so have we. That seems better than
finding out on a Zoom in week two.
A useful sanity check: if you are spending four thousand dollars a month on ads, how much should you be paying an agency to help run it? The honest answer is that at $4,000 a month you should not be paying an agency at all. The fee would dwarf the media, and there is not enough budget to learn anything from testing.
The minimum spend, and the real reason for it
Our floor is $50,000 a month in ad spend. The reason is not that
smaller accounts are not worth serving. It is arithmetic.
Creative testing needs enough budget for each test to produce a readable signal. A test ad
set needs roughly two to three conversions a day before you can judge it. Multiply that by
your CPA and by the number of concepts you want to test, and you get a number. Below about
$50,000 a month there is simply not enough testing budget for a creative programme to do
what it is supposed to do. You end up paying for a process that cannot run. We set out the
full arithmetic separately: what the minimum ad spend for a creative agency actually is,
and the underlying model in how many ad creatives you should test per week.
That threshold moves with your CPA. At a $5 CPA you can learn a great deal on a small
budget. At a $200 CPA you cannot. Anyone quoting a flat minimum without asking your CPA is
quoting their own business model, not your situation.
Agency versus in-house
This is a smaller decision than it first appears: it comes up far less often than pricing, proof or scope. But when it does come up, it is usually framed as a choice between hiring one person in house and keeping a part-time creator.
| In-house hire | Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Salary plus benefits, plus tools, plus management time | From $7,500/month, or a percentage of spend |
| Ramp | Recruit, hire, onboard. Months. | First creative inside a week |
| Capacity | One person’s output | A team’s output |
| Range | Deep on your product | Pattern-matched across many accounts |
| Risk | Hiring risk, and a single point of failure | Contract risk, and shared attention |
| Best when | You have steady, predictable volume and want the knowledge retained | You need volume or breadth faster than you can hire |
The version nobody says out loud: one in-house creative person cannot produce enough
distinct concepts to feed a serious testing programme. That is not a criticism of the
person, it is a throughput limit. Where in-house wins is depth of product knowledge and
retained institutional memory.
The failure mode of the cheap option is familiar: a part-time or offshore individual who is inexpensive and does not deliver. Cheap capacity that does not deliver is more expensive than it looks.
What should be included, and what usually is not
A retainer for creative plus growth marketing normally covers the production loop end to
end: creative strategy, concept development, production, testing, iteration on the winners,
and reporting. That is the part with a repeatable shape, which is why it can carry a
standard price.
We run the media buying as well, and it is deliberately creative-led. The buying
decisions follow what the creative is telling us rather than running as a separate
discipline alongside it, because on a modern platform the creative is what is actually being
optimised. That also means measurement is creative-level: SKAN, attribution and
efficiency work exist to answer which creative is working, not merely which campaign is.
The first creative is usually live within a week of kickoff.
Scoped and priced separately, because they are much more customised and vary far more by
business than creative production does: App Store Optimization, paywall
optimization, and web-to-app funnels. These are not add-ons with a standard rate. What
they involve depends heavily on your product, so they are worth a separate conversation
rather than a line item on a standard package. The same applies to localisation into
additional languages and to paid creator or talent fees.
When you should not hire an agency
- Below the spend threshold for your CPA. The fee will be a bigger lever on your economics than the work.
- When you have not validated the product. Creative cannot fix a retention problem, and you will spend real money proving that.
- When you have in-house capacity that is working. If your team is producing enough concepts and winning, buy tools, not people.
This post is part of our guide to how to choose a mobile UA agency.
Frequently asked questions
What does a mobile app creative agency cost?
Ours starts at $7,500 a month for creative plus growth marketing. Above roughly $100,000 in
monthly ad spend, percentage-based pricing usually works out better for you: ours is under
5% and improves with scale and channel count. The final number depends on creative volume,
how many channels you run, and whether you want media management or production only.
Is agency pricing a percentage of ad spend or a flat retainer?
Both exist. Percentage of spend scales automatically but ties the fee to budget rather than
results. A flat retainer is predictable and decouples the two, but needs renegotiating as
you grow. Some engagements blend the two.
What is the minimum ad spend to work with a creative agency?
$50,000 a month for a full-service engagement, because below that there is not enough
creative testing budget for the programme to produce readable results. The real threshold
depends on your CPA: a low-CPA app can learn on far less.
At what ad spend does hiring an agency make sense?
Once your testing budget can support enough concurrent creative tests to learn something
each week. At $4,000 a month it does not. Around $50,000 a month it does, though the honest
answer depends on your CPA rather than on a round number.
Is it cheaper to hire someone in-house?
On paper often yes, on throughput usually no. One in-house creative cannot produce the
concept volume a testing programme needs. In-house wins on product depth and retained
knowledge; an agency wins on volume and breadth, and starts sooner.
Does agency pricing include App Store Optimization?
Usually not. ASO is normally scoped and charged separately. Always confirm what is in scope
before comparing quotes.
How does pricing change as our budget grows?
It should fall as a percentage. Running a larger account is more work, but not
proportionally more, so the rate should drop as spend rises. Ours is under 5% and improves
as you scale, comfortably under 5% above $100,000 a month, and it also reflects how many
channels you are running. Be wary of any rate card charging the same percentage at $30,000
and $300,000.
