Agency pricing is opaque, mostly on purpose.
Ask five Miami agencies what a retainer costs and you will get five refusals to answer until after a discovery call. There are legitimate reasons — scope genuinely varies — but the practical effect is that buyers cannot tell whether a number is reasonable until they have already invested weeks in a process.
So here are real ranges. We are an agency and these are the numbers we and our peers actually charge in this market. Where we have an interest in the answer, we will say so.
Ranges reflect the Miami market in 2026 for agencies doing competent work. National and boutique pricing varies.
By scope
Social media management only
$2,500–$6,000/month. Content calendar, scheduling, community management, light content creation, monthly reporting. Typically 12–20 posts a month across two platforms.
Below roughly $2,000, something is being sacrificed — usually strategy, or the work is being done by someone managing twenty other accounts.
Content production
$3,000–$12,000/month depending on volume and format. A monthly or quarterly production day, editing, and asset delivery. Photography-only sits at the lower end; multi-format video with talent sits at the upper.
Paid media management
$2,000–$8,000/month, or 10–20% of ad spend, whichever is greater. Percentage-based pricing is standard above roughly $50K monthly spend; flat fees are more common below it.
Watch the incentive here: percentage-of-spend rewards the agency for spending more of your money. Ask how that is managed.
Influencer and UGC programs
$3,000–$10,000/month in management fees, excluding creator payments and usage rights. Covers sourcing, briefing, contracting, and coordination. Creator costs sit on top.
Brand strategy and identity
Usually a project, not a retainer: $15,000–$75,000 for positioning, identity, and guidelines, depending on scope and research depth.
Full service
$8,000–$25,000/month for a small-to-mid brand; $25,000–$60,000+ where paid media, production, creator programs, and strategy all run together at volume.
What is almost never in the fee
The most common source of budget surprise. Assume these are additional unless stated otherwise in writing:
- Media spend — the actual money going to the platforms
- Creator and talent fees, and paid usage rights
- Production costs: studio, crew, props, wardrobe, location, permits
- Licensing: stock, music, fonts
- Software and tooling attributed to your account
- Printing, fabrication, event production
- Paid amplification of organic content
Ask for the fee and the expected pass-through cost as two separate numbers. An agency that will not separate them is making the comparison deliberately difficult.
How agencies price, and what each model does to you
- Flat retainer. Predictable for you, and the agency absorbs overruns. The risk is scope drift in the agency's favour over time.
- Hourly. Transparent, and it penalizes efficiency — you pay more when the work takes longer, which is the wrong incentive.
- Percentage of spend. Standard in paid media and structurally rewards higher spend. Fine with a competent operator and clear efficiency targets; poor without.
- Project. Best for defined deliverables with an end state. Poor for anything requiring ongoing iteration.
- Performance-based. Attractive and rarely clean — attribution disputes are common, and agencies that carry the risk price it in heavily.
Signs you are overpaying
- You cannot name what changed last month. Activity is not the same as progress.
- The reporting is a dashboard nobody interprets. You are paying for a subscription, not judgment.
- Deliverable counts, not outcomes. "Sixteen posts" is a description of effort.
- The senior people vanished after month two. You are paying senior rates for junior execution.
- Nothing has been tested. An agency that never runs an experiment is maintaining, not growing.
- You are the one bringing the ideas. If every initiative originates with you, you have hired an execution vendor at strategy prices.
Signs you are underpaying
Less discussed and equally expensive:
- Constant turnover on your account
- Slow responses and missed deadlines — usually a sign your account is unprofitable and deprioritized
- Generic work that could belong to any brand in your category
- No pushback, ever, on anything
An agency losing money on you will not tell you. It will simply give you less attention until you leave.
What actually determines the right number
Not headcount or hours — the honest inputs are: how much revenue the work needs to influence, how fast you need it to move, how much of the input work your own team can carry, and how much production the plan genuinely requires.
A useful sanity check: total marketing investment, including media, commonly lands between 5% and 15% of revenue for growing brands. The agency fee is a portion of that, not the whole of it.
The bottom line
Ask for the fee and the pass-through costs separately. Ask what happens to the fee if scope changes. Ask who does the work. And judge the relationship on whether anything measurable changed — not on how many deliverables arrived.
The twelve questions worth asking before you sign are here.
Want a straight answer for your scope? Let's talk — we will give you a number and show you what is in it.