A media retainer priced without a tiered overflow rate is a common way small production teams lose money

The turnaround clause is doing more damage than the rate. $75 per late delivery with no volume ceiling on the obligation is a penalty you wrote against yourself, and it bites hardest exactly when you are busiest, which is the definition of a badly drafted term. A cap on shoots will not fix it. Tie the 24 hour promise to a stated weekly throughput instead, so shoots seven through twelve in a week carry 48 hours and anything past that is scheduled by agreement. That way volume never converts into penalty. Look also at whether the additional shoot rate was even the right structure. A brokerage that sends 24 shoots is buying capacity, and capacity is sold as a block with a floor rather than as an unlimited per unit rate. Any agreement like this should be read by an attorney in your state before the second one is signed.

Let me build the number properly. At six shoots the contract yields $1,900 against $708, so $1,192 of gross. Every shoot from seven to fourteen adds $140 against $118, so $22 each, which is $176 across eight shoots. Then everything past fourteen adds $140 against roughly $200 with the subcontract and your edit time, so negative $60 each. In the 24 shoot month that is ten shoots at negative $60, so negative $600, which takes half the gross on the included six. So the margin thins fast past shoot 17 or 18, and once the deductions land the whole account goes underwater. Does that match what you saw month to month, or was it worse because the deductions landed in the same months as the volume?

Before signing anything like this, the question to answer is how the brokerage behaved for the nine months before you showed up. Were they buying media at all, and from how many people? Because 14 agents going from whatever they did before to sending you the entire pipeline in five months is a behavior change, and behavior changes usually mean the old provider was more expensive or slower and they'd been rationing. Knowing they were rationing would have told you the volume was coming.

In a slower market a 14 agent shop would not generate 24 listings in a month if you gave them a year, so the failure mode there is almost the opposite of this one. Still, the pricing lesson holds in reverse. A retainer sold into that kind of market carries the risk of the brokerage using two of the six shoots and deciding the whole thing is expensive.

Anchor is asking the right thing and I'd push further. The number I'd want is not their history, it's their listing count capacity. 14 agents, if they average say 1.5 listings a month each in a decent market, that's 21 a month at the top and your six included shoots was never going to be the ceiling for anyone paying $1,900 for it. The brokerage did the obvious thing and used what they paid for and then some.

The thing I keep noticing in these threads is that people set the included quantity by what they hope the client uses rather than by what the client can physically generate. Thatch, if you'd multiplied 14 agents by their actual listing rate before you named six, would you have named six?

The paperwork is where this comes down. Two things in what you described where the exact wording matters. First, whether the $75 deduction applied per shoot or per delivery batch, because on a nineteen shoot month those are wildly different numbers and you may have been under deducted rather than over. Second, whether the additional shoot rate was stated as fixed for the term or subject to adjustment on notice. Most service agreements carry some adjustment mechanism and providers forget it is there. Also, nine months on a term you describe as over. Did it have an out or did you serve it to the end? If there was a thirty day termination for convenience clause on your side, the $3,100 was optional after about month five, and that is the more expensive mistake than the $140 rate.

Fathom's last point is the one to sit with. You knew by month five it was losing money and you kept going for four more. What made you stay?

Vellum asked the thing I was circling. My guess is the answer is that a $1,900 line looks like a business and losing it looks like going backwards, even when the line is negative. I've watched people in other industries do exactly that with their biggest account.

Every trade has this contract. Unlimited callouts, fixed monthly, and the guy who signs it works Saturdays for a year. The subcontract number is where it turned for you, because $165 out against $140 in is a loss you can see from across the room, and you paid it eight times in one month. The move at that point is to tell the client you've hit capacity and shoots past a certain count go out at a scheduled rate, and if they walk, they walk. You were already paying for the privilege of keeping them.

The same structure shows up on the management side with a different service. Take a maintenance coordination arrangement with a small owner group that includes unlimited work order intake at a flat fee. A common pattern is that intake volume triples within four months once the owners trust the service, because a client's usage rises to fill whatever is included, and it happens fast when the service is good. The usual repair at renewal is to keep the flat fee and put a monthly unit count on the included work, with everything beyond it priced at a rate that assumes help is being hired to do it. An operator in that position often loses one owner in four over the change and finds the remaining three are worth more than all four were. Thatch, your tiered rate idea is the same fix. The tier should be said out loud in the sales conversation rather than buried in the agreement, because the client who objects to the tier is telling you they intend to be the 24 shoot month.