An Amazon advertising agency plans, builds, and manages your Sponsored and display campaigns for a monthly fee. That fee sits on top of your media budget, and both are paid out of the same gross profit. So price the decision as fee plus media against added gross profit, never as a rate card comparison.
The short version
- There are two costs, and only their sum matters. The retainer and the media budget draw on one pool of gross profit.
- A flat fee makes the sum solvable. Ours starts at $800 a month for one product and reaches $2,400 for five, all 50+ services included.
- A share of ad spend is the model you will meet most often. Ask any candidate to price the same account at double today's media.
- The floor is media, not fee. We publish no hard minimum, and below about $1,000 a month of spend there are too few clicks to decide weekly.
- Cancellation belongs inside the model. Ours runs on 30 days of notice, and the Seller Central account, the campaigns, and the creative stay with you.
What the invoice looked like from the buyer's side
I ran data and technology at BRANDED and Moonshot Brands, two large Amazon aggregators. Part of the job was auditing and scaling 60+ acquired brands doing $5M to $10M each.
Plenty arrived with an advertising agency attached, so I read those invoices as the payer. Two habits came out of it.
The first is that I stopped asking what an agency charges and started asking what the channel costs in total. Fee plus media is the only figure that reaches the profit line. An agency at half the fee running twice the spend is the more expensive of the two.
The second is that I priced the exit before I priced the work. A brand was worth less to us at acquisition when the campaigns, the creative, and the account permissions sat somewhere we could not reach.
We built Flapen the way I wanted to buy. Fifty operators run about 70 brands by hand out of Abu Dhabi, nothing is subcontracted, and account access runs through permissions the client can revoke the same afternoon.
The arithmetic that decides whether an agency pays for itself
Run these five lines before you take a sales call.
- Find contribution per unit. Selling price minus landed cost minus Amazon referral and fulfillment fees minus a provision for returns.
- Turn it into a rate. Divide contribution by selling price, and that percentage is what each incremental dollar of revenue returns.
- Add the two costs. Monthly management fee plus monthly media budget is your channel cost.
- Divide channel cost by the contribution rate. The answer is the added revenue the engagement must produce before it breaks even.
- Hold it against a month you have already had. If break-even is a large multiple of your best month, the agency is not your constraint.
Here is the sum on our published figures. One product on the $800 tier, plus the $1,000 a month of media we recommend as a working floor, is $1,800 of channel cost. At a contribution rate of 30%, an illustrative number you should replace with your own, break-even sits at $6,000 of added monthly revenue.
At 20% the same channel cost needs $9,000. The rate moved ten points and the target moved $3,000, so no one can call a fee expensive without knowing your margin.
The cost table, every line included
| Cost line | What it is | Our figure |
|---|---|---|
| Management fee | Monthly, by product count | $800 for one product rising to $2,400 for five, 6 and above scoped on a call |
| Onboarding or setup | A one-time charge many add | None |
| Commission on media | A share of your ad spend | None |
| Revenue share | Outcome pricing instead of a fee | 10 to 20%, only above $50,000 a month in profit |
| Cash at signature | What leaves your account in week one | First and last month upfront |
| Media budget | Paid by you to Amazon | No hard minimum, about $1,000 a month before weekly decisions read cleanly |
| Your own hours | Time it costs you | About 2 hours a month after onboarding |
| Exit | What leaving costs | 30 days of notice, no long-term contract, no lock-in |
Flapen figures as of September 2026.
Three shapes cover almost every proposal you will read. A flat fee is fixed while your revenue is not, so cost per order falls as volume grows.
A share of ad spend moves with a number the agency recommends, so get the rate in writing and multiply it at double today's media. A share of revenue or profit ties the fee to the outcome, and ours replaces the fixed fee rather than joining it.
Run all three through step four at your own contribution rate. The proposal with the lowest break-even added revenue wins the shortlist, and it is rarely the lowest headline fee.
What an Amazon ad agency will not tell you
Four numbers stay out of the pitch, ours included, and each one is a sum you can run yourself.
- Cost per order of management is never reported. Divide the fee by the orders the account produced, so on the $800 tier two hundred orders is $4 per order, 800 orders is $1. A figure that stays flat across a quarter means you are buying maintenance at the price of growth.
- Week one costs more than the monthly rate suggests. Our first invoice covers the first month and the last month together, so a single-product account puts $1,600 on the table before a campaign is rebuilt. Ask what leaves your bank before any work lands.
- A percentage fee earns least in the month you should be spending less. Hold the rate constant, halve the media, and the fee halves alongside a decision that made you money. Ask when that last happened and what they did.
- Killing a product costs us money. Dropping from three products to two moves our own fee from $1,500 to $1,150, so an honest stop recommendation is worth $350 a month against us. Weigh our advice knowing that.
Hold us to all four. If our written audit will not run that arithmetic on your account, do not hire us.
Related answers
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- Amazon account measurement and audits: the complete guide
Here is one thing to do this week at no cost. If you sell one to five products on Amazon, write your contribution rate on one line and the fee plus media you are weighing on the next.
Divide the second by the first, and you have the added revenue any agency must produce to earn its keep. Set that figure beside your best month before you hear a pitch.
Have that arithmetic run on your own account in a free written audit, seven areas with the fixes in order, back inside 48 hours from Flapen.
