Retainer priced on output count vs priced on a named outcome, when the client can now make the output themselves

Question

Sitting with a proposal I'm about to sign as the buyer, and the structure is bothering me more than the price. It's $1,900 a month for a mid size agent team and the deliverables are enumerated. Twenty posts, four reels, two email sends, one listing package. Every line is a count.

The problem is that the team already produces about half that volume internally with AI tools and a junior. So I'm buying counts they can already hit. The provider's actual edge is that her stuff is better, and better is nowhere in the document.

I floated pricing against a named outcome instead. Not commission, something like a booked appointment number or a defined engagement floor. She pushed back, which I understand. She controls the content and not the follow up, and if the team doesn't call the leads back, her fee dies for reasons she can't touch.

So the choice is a document that measures the commoditized thing accurately, or a document that measures the thing I actually want and puts her at risk for other people's behavior. Both look wrong. Deliverable counts get repriced down every year as tools get cheaper. Outcome pricing gets argued about every month.

A third option I've seen is a floor plus a quality review, where a fixed fee covers a smaller volume and a quarterly review of the work against agreed standards drives renewal rather than a bonus. Slower, harder to game, and it depends on somebody being willing to have an uncomfortable review conversation.

What structure would you actually sign.

megan_doyle15 · Answer

Newest person in the room probably, but the bit that jumps out is that you already told us her edge is quality and the contract measures volume. Whatever structure you pick, if the word better never appears with a definition attached, you're going to end up arguing about counts in month four.

chriswalton8 · Answer

@rigging is right about the definition problem. The way I've seen it handled in other service agreements is a written standard with examples attached as an exhibit, three samples that count as acceptable and one that doesn't. It's crude and it does more work than an adjective. Outcome pricing where the provider doesn't control the conversion step is how you get a provider who resents you by month six.

sonia_alvarez · Answer

Deliverable counts have one real virtue, which is that they're cheap to administer. You can check twenty posts in four minutes. A quality review costs somebody two hours a quarter and it costs a difficult conversation, and most buyers won't spend either, which is why the counts survive even when everyone knows they measure the wrong thing. If you genuinely will do the review, the third option is better. If you won't, sign the counts and negotiate the price down annually as tools get cheaper.

devon_pierce · Answer

I'd sign the floor plus review and I'd put the reprice clause in the same document. Something like the fee gets revisited at twelve months against what the work costs to produce then. It's honest about the direction tools are moving and it means neither of you is pretending the $1,900 is a permanent number.

Retainer priced on output count vs priced on a named outcome, when the client can now make the output themselves

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