A monthly fee should break into four buckets: catalog and content, advertising, supply and operations, and reporting. Ours runs $800 a month for one product to $2,400 for five, with all 50 plus services included at every tier and no commission, no revenue share, and no onboarding fee.
The short version
- A fee is four cost centers, not one number. Ask a candidate to allocate their price across the four.
- Tier by product count, not by revenue. Work scales with the size of the catalog, not with how well it sells.
- Everything included at every tier is the honest structure. Unlocking services by tier is a price rise on a timer.
- Five separate costs sit outside any fee. Stock, Amazon's seller fees, trademark, freight, and the ad budget.
- Score what you are being charged for, bucket by bucket, before you compare two proposals.
Why the fee is shaped the way it is
Brand management is not one job. It is a catalog job, an advertising job, a supply job, and a reporting job, each requiring different people, and the monthly fee is those four payrolls divided across the accounts they serve. That is the mechanism, and it explains the two things sellers find confusing about agency pricing.
First, why the fee tiers on product count rather than revenue. Each additional product adds listing maintenance, images, campaigns, and inventory planning whether it sells well or not. A product doing $5,000 a month and one doing $50,000 take a similar amount of catalog work. Pricing on revenue charges you for your own success, which is a different transaction.
Second, why the number does not drop much for a small brand. The four functions still have to exist. You can buy less of them, which is what a lower tier is, but you cannot buy a fraction of a creative studio.
The breakdown, bucket by bucket
| Bucket | What sits inside it | Done properly looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog and content | Listing setup and optimization, images, A plus content, brand store, locale versions | Copy and imagery rewritten for the market, not translated, with the primary image tested |
| Advertising | Campaign structure, keyword strategy, bid management, negative keywords, target setting | A named campaign owner, bid work every week, and the reasoning behind each target written down |
| Supply and operations | Sourcing management, supplier negotiation, quality control, inventory planning | A named person who has spoken to your factory this quarter |
| Strategy and reporting | Brand manager time, weekly written update, live review, ad hoc access | A written update every week and a live review every two weeks |
Our tiers: $800 a month for one product, $1,150 for two, $1,500 for three, $1,950 for four, and $2,400 for five. Six or more gets scoped on a call. Every one of those tiers includes all four buckets in full, which is deliberate, because tiered service unlocking is how a cheap headline fee becomes an expensive real one.
Outside the fee at any agency worth hiring: your stock, Amazon's own seller fees, trademark registration, freight and duties, and the advertising budget itself. Plan $8,000 to $15,000 of total capital for a single-product launch and $25,000 to $50,000 for a five-product brand, including all of that.
Score the proposal in front of you
Take any quote and score each bucket from zero to five. Zero means not mentioned, three means listed as a service, five means someone named will do it and you know how often.
| Bucket | Weight | What earns a five |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog and content | 30 | Named owner, locale plan, image testing cadence |
| Advertising | 30 | Written targets you agreed to, and a campaign structure you can see |
| Supply and operations | 20 | Real sourcing or quality control capability, not a referral |
| Strategy and reporting | 20 | Fixed cadence in writing, plus direct access between reports |
Multiply, add, and divide by five. Under 60 out of 100, the proposal is a service list rather than a plan. Two proposals within ten points of each other are close enough that you should choose on the audit they produced instead.
The line item nobody prices
Every fee structure buys the work. Almost none of them buy the decision to stop.
I once poured money into a failing product for three months, hoping the advertising would turn it around. It did not. That is where our kill criteria came from: rating trend, return rate, conversion rate, and acquisition cost trajectory, judged over a defined window, with an explicit call to scale, fix, or stop.
When you read a pricing page, look for who owns that call and what it costs them to make it honestly. On a flat fee, the answer is nothing, which is the argument for a flat fee. On any structure tied to spend or sales, stopping a product reduces the agency's income, and the pricing page will not mention that.
What most agencies will not tell you
The most profitable line in agency pricing is the onboarding fee, because it is charged before any result exists and it makes the first month look busy. We do not charge one. Ask candidates what theirs covers, and then ask what happens to it if you leave in month two.
The other quiet thing is that a low tier is usually cheap because it removes attention rather than services. The service list stays intact and the hours behind it shrink, which is invisible in a proposal and obvious by month three. Ask how many brands the person on your account carries, and ask what the tier changes about that number. If a cheaper tier means the same work by the same team with less time, you have found the actual price difference.
Related answers
- Amazon brand management for startups under $2k
- How to negotiate Amazon brand management contracts
- Fair Amazon agency pricing models
- What does a good Amazon account audit include
- Hiring an Amazon agency: the complete guide
Every tier and everything inside it is listed publicly at Flapen.
