Direct answer
There's no single "fair" number, because the honest range depends on what's actually broken, not on your company's size. Quotes vary wildly because most of them price activity — hours, deliverables, channels — before anyone works out what needs fixing. X8's own published rates: a one-time Commercial Diagnostic at €2,900 fixed, then an ongoing retainer of €3,900–€6,500 a month on a six-month minimum, once the work and its complexity are known. Diagnose first, and the range narrows fast.
You've asked a few marketing companies for a monthly number, and you've got numbers back that don't just differ — they don't overlap. Two and a half thousand euros from one. Seven thousand from another. Four thousand eight hundred from a third, with a different list of what's included every time. It's tempting to conclude that someone is lying, padding the number, or that outside marketing help simply doesn't price honestly.
None of that is quite what's happening. They're not disagreeing about your price. They're disagreeing about what they'd actually be doing for it — and none of them asked the one question that would have narrowed the number: what's actually broken here?
Why the numbers don't line up
Ask an agency for a retainer quote and you'll usually get a bundle back: so many hours of content a month, a set number of ad campaigns, a person assigned to your account, a reporting cadence. Price that bundle and you get a number. Swap the bundle — fewer hours, one more channel, a junior instead of a senior person — and the number moves, sometimes by thousands a month, without anyone ever asking whether the bundle was the right thing to buy in the first place.
That's the trick hiding inside "wildly varying quotes." They're not pricing your problem. They're pricing a package of activity, built before anyone looked at what your business actually needs. Two agencies can both be pricing honestly and still land nowhere near each other, because they built two different packages for a problem neither of them diagnosed.
What a retainer quote might actually be paying to fix
Underneath almost every marketing problem sits one of three things, in plain terms, and a monthly retainer only helps with one of them.
Your tracking could be broken or made up — the numbers you're shown don't reflect what's actually happening, so nobody, including the agency billing you, really knows if the work is working. Or a decision above the work was never made — who you're actually for, what you're really selling, what you want to be known for. No amount of content, ads, or posting fixes a decision that hasn't been made; it just executes the undecided thing faster and more expensively. Or the decisions are sound and the tracking is real, and what's missing is simply consistent, competent execution over time — which is what a retainer is actually built for.
Most retainer quotes assume you're in that third group by default. That's why a number can be entirely fair for the work described and still be the wrong number for your business, because the work described isn't what would fix it.
A quote built before anyone diagnosed the problem is a number with nothing underneath it. It might still turn out to be right. That would be luck, not pricing.
What actually moves the number, once you know what's broken
Once the diagnosis is done — once you know whether the fix is a decision, the tracking, or the execution — the range of a fair monthly number narrows fast. A handful of factors do almost all the work of moving it up or down.
| Factor | Pushes the number down | Pushes the number up |
|---|---|---|
| Who you're for and what you sell | Already decided and tested | Still being worked out alongside the marketing itself |
| Channels involved | One or two, already chosen | Several running at once, each needing separate judgment |
| Marketing already in-house | Someone executes day to day internally | No internal marketing function — more gets carried externally |
| How buyers decide | One clear buyer, a short decision | Several stakeholders, a longer or riskier purchase |
X8's own published numbers
X8 prices this in public, so there's a real example to check the argument against, rather than a client story that has to be anonymised to be usable. This is X8's own pricing, not a case study.
Published rates: the Commercial Diagnostic is €2,900, fixed, paid once, no retainer required. It covers a full audit of the commercial core, positioning (who you're for and why), and website, a map of where buyers hesitate, an explicit stop-list of what not to spend on, a 90-day roadmap in priority order, and one 90-minute debrief. The price does not move with what it finds. The ongoing commercial leadership retainer that can follow it runs €3,900–€6,500 a month, on a six-month minimum, then month to month with one month's notice on either side — a range set by the complexity of the work, not by what sounds proportionate to your revenue.
The guarantee question, answered honestly
Ask what happens if the diagnostic finds nothing much worth fixing, and you'll often hear a generous-sounding answer: then it's free. That promise fails the same test this whole article applies to retainer quotes. It moves the fee with the verdict — which pays the diagnostician to find something, every time. A finding of "your commercial foundation holds, spend the money elsewhere" would cost them their entire fee, so it is the one conclusion the structure discourages.
The version that holds up guarantees the work rather than the verdict. At X8, that means: the diagnostic covers the scope agreed at the start, its findings are evidenced rather than asserted, and you can act on what you get. If it fails on any of those, it gets reworked; if the rework doesn't resolve it, the fee is refunded, raised in writing within 14 days of the debrief. What it cannot promise is a particular conclusion, because a promised conclusion is a purchased one. "Nothing much needs to change, and here's the evidence" is a legitimate outcome that gets invoiced like any other.
Why diagnose before committing to a monthly number
The diagnostic isn't a sales device stacked in front of the retainer — it's the reason the retainer number can be narrow at all. This is the same logic behind paying to diagnose before you pay to fix: you don't set a monthly figure and hope it matches the problem; you find the problem, then set the figure. You can see what the diagnostic covers and what it costs on the pricing section of the homepage, or read the fuller argument for governing marketing spend with the same rigour as any other function that costs money in Reports, Not Revenue.
Only after that work is done does the ongoing retainer get quoted — and it's still a range, because businesses genuinely differ in complexity. But it's a range built from an actual list of what needs doing, not a number invented to sound proportionate to how big you are.
Before you sign anything monthly
- Ask what's actually broken — bad tracking, an unmade decision, or execution — before asking for a number.
- Ask whether the quote would change if the diagnosis came back different than assumed.
- Ask for an explicit stop-list: what won't be done, and why not.
- Ask whether the monthly figure was set before or after anyone looked at your business specifically.
- Ask what happens if a diagnosis finds nothing worth fixing — and be careful if the answer is "then it's free", because that pays them to find something.
- Ask for the minimum term and the notice period in writing, not just the monthly figure.
Marc Wajsberg — Senior Marketing Strategist, X8 Agency. 30+ years across buyer psychology and commercial strategy, 150+ businesses guided. More about Marc.
If you don't yet know whether your problem is tracking, an unmade decision, or execution:
A monthly retainer quoted before that's known is a number with nothing under it — right, possibly, but only by chance.
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