Retainer, Project or Performance: How New Zealand Agencies Actually Charge

When someone asks what a digital marketing retainer costs in New Zealand, they are usually asking something else underneath it. They are asking who carries the risk if this does not work.

That is the real difference between a retainer, a fixed-price project and a performance deal. The dollar figures move around, but the thing that actually changes is who is exposed when a campaign takes longer than anyone hoped. Every pricing conversation I have with a business owner comes back to that, whether or not either of us says it out loud.

So this post covers the three models by what they do to the incentives on both sides, then our own prices, then the deal we turn down most often.

Key Takeaways

A retainer buys ongoing capacity and puts the timing risk on you. A fixed project puts the scope risk on the agency. A performance deal moves the cash risk to the agency and quietly moves control to them as well.
Retainers dominate the market. Ahrefs, polling 439 SEO providers globally, found 78.2% charge a monthly retainer for some or all of their services.
Our published rates: SEO retainers $1,500 to $3,500 per month, month to month, ads management quoted per account after a free audit, plus your ad spend, funnel builds from $1,500 to $2,000 plus a retainer to run traffic, websites from $1,500 with most business sites between $1,500 and $7,000.
We will not do a straight revenue share on most accounts, and the reason is not confidence. It is that revenue share requires us to control things that belong to you, like your sales follow-up and your pricing.
We do not lock anyone in. SEO takes four to eight months to judge fairly, and if you choose to commit to a fixed term we can usually price it lower.

The Three Models, Side by Side

Each model answers the same question differently: what exactly are you buying with this month’s payment?

The Retainer: You Are Buying Capacity

A retainer is a recurring monthly fee for ongoing work. You are buying a set amount of senior attention every month, applied to a strategy that compounds.

What the agency optimises for: retention. A retainer agency’s whole business model depends on you staying past month four, which makes it unusually motivated to show you progress you can see. The flip side is the failure mode everybody has heard about: the account that goes quiet, where the reporting keeps arriving and the work slows down.

When it is right: SEO, content, ongoing paid media management, anything where the result is cumulative and the next month’s work builds on the last. If the deliverable is genuinely never finished, a retainer is the honest shape for it.

Who carries the risk: you do, on timing. You pay month three whether or not month three is the month things move.

The Fixed Project: You Are Buying a Defined Outcome

A project fee is a single agreed price for a defined piece of work with a start and an end. A website. A funnel build. A migration.

What the agency optimises for: efficiency inside the scope. Once the price is fixed, every extra hour comes out of the agency’s margin, which is exactly why good agencies scope projects in painful detail before quoting and why scope creep conversations get awkward.

When it is right: anything with a finish line. If you can describe what “done” looks like in a sentence, it should be a project, not a retainer.

Who carries the risk: the agency does, on scope. If the build takes twice as long as quoted, that is their problem, which is the whole appeal for you.

The Performance Deal: You Are Buying Alignment, in Theory

Performance pricing ties the fee to an outcome: cost per lead, a percentage of revenue attributed to the work, a commission per sale.

What the agency optimises for: the metric in the contract, and nothing else. This is the part people underestimate. Write the contract around leads and you will get leads, including the ones your sales team would call rubbish. Write it around attributed revenue and you will get an argument about attribution every single month.

When it is right: narrow situations. A single measurable transaction, a clean tracking path, a short sales cycle, and a client who genuinely cannot fund anything upfront.

Who carries the risk: the agency, on cash. Client Ascension, an agency training programme, lists the same three problems from the agency’s side in its rundown of marketing agency pricing models: revenue uncertainty, high pressure, and external dependency, because “the success of a performance-based campaign is not always entirely within the agency’s control.” That is their argument for why agencies avoid it. My argument is that the same three problems are why it usually ends up being the worse deal for the client too, which I will come back to.

What the Wider Market Charges

There is very little published New Zealand pricing data that is worth quoting, so treat any New Zealand figure you see, including on our own competitors’ pages, as an estimate unless it names a source.

The best-sourced numbers available are global. Ahrefs polled 439 SEO service providers and published the results in its SEO pricing study. Their findings, in US dollars:

78.2% of providers charge a monthly retainer for some or all of their services.
The most common monthly retainer band is $501 to $1,000, charged by 20.4% of respondents.
Agencies specifically average $3,209 per month.
The most common hourly rate is $75 to $100, charged by 24% of respondents, against an overall average of $111 per hour.

Those are worldwide figures in USD, including a lot of low-cost markets, so do not convert them and treat the result as an Auckland benchmark. What they are useful for is the shape: retainers are the default almost everywhere, and the spread between the common band and the average is enormous, which tells you the word “retainer” describes wildly different amounts of work.

What We Charge and Why

We publish our rates because the alternative is a discovery call that exists mainly to work out what you can afford.

SEO: $1,500 to $3,500 per month, month to month. The range is about competition and the state of the site, not about how much we like you. A local service business in a thin market sits at the bottom. A national brand against funded competitors sits at the top.

Ads management: a flat monthly fee, quoted per account after a free audit, plus your ad spend. Flat, not a percentage of spend. A percentage fee means our income goes up when your budget goes up, which is a strange incentive to hand an agency whose job includes telling you when to stop spending.

Funnel builds: $1,500 to $2,000 for the build, plus a retainer to run the traffic. The build is a project because it has a finish line. The traffic is a retainer because it does not.

Websites: from $1,500 for a starter site, with most business sites between $1,500 and $7,000. Custom applications and e-commerce are scoped individually.

The proof that the ads model works the way we say it does is in the accounts. On Fundmaster’s paid-traffic funnel we cut cost per lead by 21% and increased leads by 18% while ad spend went down 7%. On a percentage-of-spend fee, that project would have cut our own revenue. On a flat fee, it was simply the job.

Across 200+ projects since 2018 we have generated over $1 million in revenue for clients from the leads and sales behind that work, and we have 70+ five-star Google reviews. Those are the numbers we will put behind a price.

This is the offer that comes up most often, usually phrased as a compliment. If you are so confident, take a cut instead.

Here is the honest answer. A revenue share only works if the agency controls the whole path from click to cash. We do not. We can put a qualified enquiry in your inbox at nine in the morning. What happens next is yours: whether someone rings back that day, how the quote is written, what you charge, whether the job gets booked in this month or next.

So a revenue share deal forces one of two outcomes. Either we accept payment on things we cannot influence, which means we price in that risk and you end up paying more than a retainer would have cost. Or we start demanding influence over your sales process, your pricing and your follow-up, and the arrangement stops being marketing support and becomes a partnership you did not intend to enter.

There is a second problem that nobody mentions on the way in. Revenue share is uncapped. A retainer at $2,500 a month costs you $30,000 a year no matter how well the year goes. A 10% revenue share on a campaign that works properly can cost you several times that, and the moment it does, you will want to renegotiate, and the relationship sours at exactly the point it was succeeding.

We will do outcome-linked pricing in narrow cases: a defined cost-per-lead target on a single campaign with clean tracking and a short sales cycle. What we will not do is tie our income to revenue we cannot see, cannot verify, and cannot influence.

Why We Do Not Ask for a Minimum Term

Contract length is the one term people push back on hardest, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a policy.

We work month to month on everything, SEO included. Nobody is locked in, and that is deliberate: if the work is not earning its place, a contract should not be what keeps it going.

SEO does compound, though, and that changes how you should judge it rather than how long you should be tied to it. The technical fixes, the content, the links and the internal structure in month one do most of their work in months four through eight. So give it that window before deciding, and expect monthly reporting detailed enough that you know by month two whether the work is heading the right way.

If you already know you want the work for the long run, you can choose to commit to a fixed term, and we can usually offer a better rate for it. That is your call, not a condition of working with us.

Ads and funnel work are different. Those can be judged in weeks, and they should be.

Five Questions to Ask Before You Sign

Ask these of us and of anyone else you are considering. The answers are more revealing than the price.

What exactly do I own if I leave? The site, the ad account, the tracking setup, the content, the landing pages. Get the list in writing. An agency that keeps your Google Ads account is not pricing a service, it is pricing a hostage.
What happens in month one, specifically? A good answer is a list of tasks. A bad answer is a list of values.
Who is actually doing the work? Not who is in the pitch. If the senior person you are talking to will not touch the account after signup, you are buying a different service to the one being demonstrated.
What does the monthly report contain, and can I see a real one? Redacted, obviously. If nobody can show you a sample report, there may not be a standard one.
What would make you tell me to stop spending? Every honest agency has an answer to this. It is the fastest way to find out whether the incentives point at your outcome or at the invoice.

If you are still weighing up whether to hire anyone at all, we wrote a longer piece on how to choose the right digital marketing agency that covers the vetting side.

FAQ

How much does SEO typically cost in New Zealand?

Our SEO retainers run from $1,500 to $3,500 plus GST per month, month to month, and that is the band most comparable New Zealand agencies quote for small and medium businesses. Where you land inside it depends on how competitive your market is, what condition the site is in, and how fast you want to move. Anything much cheaper is usually reporting rather than work. We break the numbers down further in our guide to what SEO actually costs in New Zealand, and pricing varies by city as well, which we covered in SEO agency pricing by New Zealand city.

How much do digital marketing agencies charge per month in New Zealand?

It depends entirely on the service, which is why a single monthly figure is misleading. Ads management is often a flat fee or a percentage of spend and sits well below an SEO retainer; ours is a flat monthly fee, quoted after a free audit, plus your ad spend. SEO and content retainers are higher because the monthly work is the deliverable. If you are comparing two quotes, compare what arrives each month, not the number at the bottom.

What is the hourly rate for digital marketing in New Zealand?

There is no reliable published figure for New Zealand hourly rates, and most agencies here do not sell by the hour anyway. The nearest sourced number is global: Ahrefs’ SEO pricing study of 439 providers found the most common hourly rate is US$75 to US$100, charged by 24% of respondents, against an average of US$111 per hour. That is a worldwide sample in US dollars, so do not read it as an Auckland rate. In practice, hourly billing rewards slowness, which is why we do not use it.

Should I pay an agency on performance instead of a retainer?

Usually no, and not because agencies are afraid of accountability. A performance deal prices in the risk the agency is taking on things it cannot control, like your sales follow-up and your close rate, so you generally pay more when it works and get narrower, metric-chasing work while it runs. A flat fee with clear reporting and a short review cycle gives you most of the accountability with none of the incentive distortion.

Why do agencies ask for a six-month commitment?

Because SEO and content work compound, and the results from month one mostly land in months four to eight, so some agencies use a minimum term to make sure they are judged over that window. We do not require one: we work month to month, and if you choose a fixed term we can usually price it lower. Either way, you should get monthly reporting good enough that you know well before month six whether it is working, and clear ownership of everything produced. Ads and funnel work do not need the same runway. For what the timeline actually looks like, see how long SEO takes in New Zealand.

Where That Leaves You

Pick the model that matches the shape of the work, not the one that feels safest. Finished thing with a finish line: project. Ongoing compounding work: retainer. Genuinely single, cleanly tracked transaction and no cash to start: performance, carefully, with the metric written tightly.

Then ignore the model entirely and look at the reporting. The pricing structure decides who carries the risk. The reporting decides whether either of you will notice in time.

If you want our read on which model fits what you are trying to do, get in touch and we will tell you straight, including when the answer is that you do not need an agency yet.