Month-to-month with 30 days' notice is the strongest alternative and the one we run. Paid pilots, per-deliverable project work, and a scoped audit before any retainer all work too. The point is the same: keep the exit cheap, so the agency has to earn the next month rather than invoice it.
The short version
- A twelve month term is a financing arrangement, not a quality signal.
- Four alternatives exist: month-to-month, paid pilot, project fee, and audit-first engagement.
- Notice period is the real term. Ninety days' notice on a rolling contract is a quarterly contract.
- Ask what happens on exit before you ask about the discount. Account, campaigns, creative, handover.
- Discounted annual deals are fine if the exit is fair. Most are not, so read the termination clause first.
The mistake, and what it costs
The common error is negotiating the discount instead of the exit. A twelve month term at ten percent off looks like a saving of one month's fee. If the work is wrong and you discover it in month three, you have bought nine months of something you no longer want, and the ten percent has cost you nine times its own value.
I have watched this happen from both sides. The tell is always the same: the exit terms were the last thing read and the first thing that mattered.
The four alternatives, in the order you should try them
Run these as stages with a gate at each one. You can stop at any stage and still own everything produced so far.
- Start with a free written audit. Ours comes back inside 48 hours with prioritized fixes, at no charge. The gate: does the document contain findings specific to your account, with a named owner for each fix. Generic observations mean the audit was a brochure.
- Buy one scoped deliverable. A listing rebuild, a creative set, a keyword architecture. Fixed price, fixed date, defined artifact. The gate: did it arrive on time and does it match the brief. This is the cheapest possible test of whether an agency executes.
- Run a paid pilot on a defined scope. Thirty to sixty days on a subset of the catalog. The gate: a measurable movement in a metric agreed at the start. For us, a measurable improvement in ACoS typically shows inside the first 30 days of a normal engagement, which is a reasonable bar to hold anyone to.
- Convert to month-to-month. Rolling, 30 days' notice, no minimum term. The gate is now permanent: every month has to be worth the next invoice.
If an agency will not do stage one or two, that is the answer to the question you came with.
What the audit at stage one should contain
This is the stage most people skip, and it is the one that reveals depth. A real audit reads the account and the market around it, not just the account.
Our research runs on 90 plus data points before a recommendation is made: market size, growth trajectory, return rate, segment dynamics, and the rating gap between what customers want and what the category currently delivers. Differentiation comes out of competitor negative reviews and that rating gap, never out of invention. Review count and monthly volume are the two numbers everyone quotes, and they are the two least useful on their own.
So the test for any free audit is not whether it is free. It is what was analyzed besides reviews and revenue estimates.
| Stage | What you pay | What you risk | What you learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit | Nothing | An hour of access | Whether they can read an account |
| Scoped deliverable | One fixed fee | One deliverable | Whether they execute on time |
| Paid pilot | 30 to 60 days of fee | Two months | Whether the work moves a number |
| Month-to-month | Rolling fee | 30 days | Everything, continuously |
When a longer commitment is reasonable
Two cases. First, work with a long production tail, such as a multi-market launch where creative, compliance, and inventory arrive months before revenue. Second, a performance deal where the agency front-loads the build and collects later.
Even then, the commitment should be scoped to the specific project, not applied to the whole relationship, and it should carry a termination-for-cause clause with defined triggers. A full brand launch runs around seven months in our experience, and that is a project timeline, not a reason to lock the ongoing management fee for a year.
What most agencies will not tell you
The notice period is where the term hides. A contract described as month-to-month with 90 days' notice is a rolling quarterly commitment, and it is presented as flexibility because technically nothing auto-renews. Read the notice clause before the term clause. Ours is 30 days.
The second thing: the reason long terms are pushed has less to do with your results than with the agency's own planning. Predictable revenue makes hiring easier. That is a legitimate business need, and it is not your problem to solve with a twelve month signature. The honest version of that request is a discount offered against a term you can still exit for cause.
Related answers
- Month-to-month vs annual Amazon contracts
- Pay-as-you-go Amazon account audit options
- Contract terms to negotiate with Amazon agencies
- Amazon agency red flags to watch out for
- Amazon agency pricing and economics: the complete guide
Our terms, notice period, and exit conditions are published alongside pricing at Flapen.
