What Should You Actually Be Charging This Client?

Parakeeto and Promethean Research benchmark healthy digital-agency net margin at 20–30%. The calculator defaults to 25% as the middle of that range. Boutique consultancies and specialist shops can target 30–40% on the strength of premium positioning. Full-service agencies with heavy production overhead typically accept 15–22%.

Below 15% is the bleeding zone — you’re running on hope. Above 40% is unusual and usually means either exceptional pricing power or under-servicing that will eventually surface as churn.

Industry standard sits between 10% and 20% on top of media spend, depending on the platform and the agency’s positioning. PPC agencies on Google Ads usually charge 15%. Programmatic and display, where there’s more setup and trafficking work, often run 20–25%. Some specialist agencies skip media markup entirely and bake the equivalent into their service fee.

The right answer depends on your model: if you’re transparent about markup with clients, 12–18% is the comfortable band. If markup is opaque and bundled, the effective number tends to land higher.

Both work, but they signal different things. Markup ties your revenue to client spend — when they scale media up, you scale automatically. Easier on rising-tide clients; ugly on declining ones. Higher service fee insulates you from ad spend volatility but caps your upside when clients scale.

Most agencies use a hybrid: a base service fee that covers fixed work + a smaller markup that captures the variable upside. The calculator handles both — adjust the markup slider to zero and see what the service fee would need to be to compensate.

“Loaded” means the true cost of an hour of someone’s time — not just their hourly rate. It includes salary, employer taxes, benefits, software seats, and allocated overhead. The formula: annual salary × 1.3–1.5×, divided by realistic billable hours per year (~1,600 senior, ~1,800 junior — not the theoretical 2,080).

The dropdown’s tiers reflect roughly: Junior ($45K base ≈ $50/hr loaded), Mid ($65K ≈ $75/hr), Senior ($95K ≈ $110/hr), Lead/Strategist ($130K ≈ $150/hr), Director ($175K+ ≈ $200/hr). Pick the role doing the bulk of the work.

Lead with the work, not the price. “Looking at the last six months, the scope has expanded from X to Y, and our team is now spending Z hours/month on your account. To deliver this at the level you’ve come to expect, we need to adjust the retainer to $A” is a different conversation than “we need to raise the price.”

Time the conversation at renewal, not mid-cycle. Offer two paths: same scope at the higher price, or the original scope at the current price. Most clients pick the first because they’ve been getting the expanded version for free — they just didn’t know.

Because you have two levers — service fee and media markup — and the right one depends on the client. The “target service fee” assumes your current markup stays the same; the “target markup” assumes your current fee stays the same. Either path hits your target margin.

For clients with low ad spend, the markup lever is too small to move the needle — you have to raise the fee. For clients with high ad spend ($50K+/month), even a 2–3 point markup bump closes the gap without touching the headline retainer. The calculator gives you both so you can choose the easier conversation.

For every client, at least once a year — three months before the renewal date. Pricing decisions compound across renewal cycles, so catching the gap early gives you time to either reset expectations or quietly adjust over multiple renewals instead of one painful jump.

For new business pitches, run it before you send the proposal. The calculator’s “target service fee” output is the floor you should be quoting at, not the ceiling.

No — and it’s not trying to. This is a pricing-decision tool. It tells you what to quote, what to renegotiate, and where the margin’s leaking. It doesn’t track invoices, run payroll, or file taxes.

Pair the per-client margin view in Swydo with your accounting tool (Xero, QuickBooks, etc.) and time-tracking (Toggl integrates natively). Three systems, one source of truth for the pricing question.