Two weeks ago, we cut our starting price from $1,500/month to $900/month. That's a 40% drop on our entry point. For an agency positioning itself around premium work, that number matters, so I want to explain it — honestly — instead of letting people guess.
The short version: the market changed, our thinking changed with it, and I'd rather help ten well-fit clients get to a real result at $900 than sit at $1,500 and watch good businesses walk away because our anchor felt out of reach in a rough year.
Reason 01The market isn't the market we priced against in 2024
When we set $1,500 as our floor, marketing budgets were larger, agency shopping was quicker, and founders were saying yes to entry-level engagements without much friction. That's not the reality right now. Every founder I talk to — real estate, SaaS, F&B, doesn't matter — is trimming discretionary spend, testing before committing, and asking harder questions about what they get for their money. Rightly so.
The old price wasn't wrong for the old market. It's wrong for this one. Holding it out of principle would have been vanity.
Reason 02We got better at doing meaningful work in less time
Two years ago, delivering a real strategic result at $900/month wasn't possible for us. We didn't have the systems. Every engagement felt custom, senior time was going into things a system should handle, and margins on smaller accounts got squeezed until nobody was happy.
That's changed. Over the last year we've built out the internal machinery — a 10-person team with specialized roles, templated strategic frameworks, and a repeatable onboarding process — that lets us do meaningful work at a lower price point without doing worse work. Not less work; different work, delivered more efficiently.
$900/month buys you: a strategic foundation for one channel, 12-16 pieces of content per month, community management, and monthly reporting. That's a real service, not a stripped-down demo. It won't include every channel, every ad platform, or dedicated design work — those layer on as scope grows.
Reason 03The people we most want to work with were sitting out
Here's the part that hurt to admit. Over the last six months I watched a handful of small real estate teams, early-stage SaaS founders, and boutique F&B brands reach out, take a look at our work, and quietly step back. Not because we weren't a fit — because they couldn't justify $1,500 as a first commitment, especially in a year like this one.
Some of them are the exact clients I'd bet on for the long run. Founder-led. Ambitious. The kind who'd stay for years if the first engagement went well. Pricing them out of the door was costing us more, over a five-year window, than the extra $600/month per client would have earned.
Our best clients have been with us four years and counting. That kind of retention is where the real business is. $900 as an entry point is a bet that the lifetime value of the right kind of client dwarfs the difference in starting anchor.
Reason 04Transparency is the actual competitive advantage
Most agencies won't publish their prices at all. You get on a discovery call, they qualify you, they build a proposal, and the number lands as a surprise. We've always published ours — because when a prospect can see the number before we talk, the calls that happen are the calls that should happen. Everyone else has already opted themselves out.
Publishing $900 does the same thing on a wider aperture. It signals: we're not gatekeeping through opacity. The businesses that can grow with us at $900 come in. The ones who need $5,000/month of output still see that on the same page. Nobody's misled either direction.
What $900 doesn't mean
It doesn't mean we stopped doing higher-scope work — most of our engagements still land in the $2,000-5,000/month range, and the ceiling hasn't moved. Our biggest client is still our biggest client.
It doesn't mean we cut quality. Every engagement still gets founder-level attention on strategy, native-voice content, and the same reporting rigor we described in our multi-market playbook. The team hasn't changed. The process hasn't loosened.
It doesn't mean we're desperate. It means we looked at the market honestly, priced ourselves to be reachable for the businesses we most want to work with, and trusted that good work at a fair price beats great work at an intimidating one.
What I'd say to another agency owner watching this market
If you're holding old prices in a market that's moved past them, you're paying for that stubbornness in leads you never hear about. The prospects who quietly walk away rarely tell you why. You just see them show up on a competitor's client list six months later.
Adjusting a floor isn't a signal that your work is worth less. It's a signal that you're paying attention. The clients who value your work will pay for it at any reasonable number. The ones who never would have hired you at the old price now have a way in — and if you deliver, they stay.
For us, the bet is this: $900/month, delivered well, buys a client relationship that lasts years. If we're right, this is the best pricing decision we've made. If we're wrong, we adjust again. Either way, we're not going to price ourselves out of the businesses that would have made this year work.