How do I know if my agency is overcharging me?
Six checks, none of which require an argument or an audit. Most of them are one email. If more than two come back badly, the problem is structural rather than personal.
Short answer: you cannot tell from the total. You tell from the staffing plan behind it. Ask for names, grades and hours per month, then compare that list against the people you have actually met and the work you have actually received. Overcharging in this industry almost never looks like an inflated price; it looks like a reasonable price for a team that is not really on your account.
The six checks
- Ask for the staffing plan. Names, grades, hours. A refusal is itself the answer.
- Count the people you have met. Plans routinely list nine; clients routinely know three.
- Reconcile media. Pull the platform billing export yourself and check it against the invoice.
- Check whose name the ad accounts are in. If it is not yours, you cannot verify anything and you cannot leave cleanly.
- List the deliverables you did not ask for. Monthly decks, status reports, competitor round-ups. Ask what would break if they stopped.
- Ask what happens to the fee if the scope halves. If nothing does, you are buying availability, not output.
Why the answer is usually "no, but"
Most agencies are not overcharging in any sense a court would recognise. They are charging correctly for a model that no longer costs what it used to. A large share of the hours in a traditional retainer were never thinking — they were resizing, versioning, subtitling, localising, cutting down, assembling reports. That work now takes a fraction of the time.
The saving is real and it is enormous. Very little of it has reached clients, because in an hours-based business a saving and a margin are the same number.
What to do instead of leaving
- Buy jobs, not months. A retainer prices availability; you want output.
- Get scope and price in writing before work starts, and treat every change as needing re-approval.
- Move the ad accounts, pixels and analytics into your own name. Today, not at renewal.
- Cut the deliverables that exist to fill a retainer rather than to move a number.
None of that requires firing anyone. It moves the conversation onto ground where you can see what you are buying, which is usually enough.
There is a free calculator on this site that does the arithmetic for you: put in your retainer and the people on your account, and it works out what share is reaching the work. It does not ask for your email until after it has given you the number. Run the audit.
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