Most agencies will not tell you how they price. We will, because the way we price is the clearest statement we can make about how we intend to work with you.
An Apex partnership is priced at roughly 1% of your revenue per year, with a minimum of $15,000 a month. Here is the reasoning, including the parts that are uncomfortable.
Day rates pay us to be slow
The standard model is time. You buy hours or days, and we invoice for them. It is easy to understand and it quietly points us in the wrong direction.
Under a day rate, the most profitable thing we can do is take longer. Not fraudulently, just naturally. There is no reason to automate our own work, no reason to reuse something we built for another client, no reason to tell you a piece of work is not worth doing. Every efficiency we find costs us money. That is a bad set of incentives to hand a partner who is going to sit inside your operation for years.
Fixed-price projects fix that for a bounded piece of work, which is why we still sell them. They do not fix it for an ongoing relationship, because every change becomes a negotiation and you learn to stop asking.
Why revenue, and not headcount or hours
We price against revenue because it is the number that best predicts how complex a business is to work with, and how much value there is to find in it.
A business turning over $10 million has more systems, more people, more compliance and more decisions than one turning over $3 million. The work is harder and the upside is bigger. Revenue tracks both, roughly but honestly, and it is a number you already know without us auditing anything.
It also means the price moves with you. If a year of our work helps you grow, the partnership grows too. We would rather be paid more because you did well than paid more because we were inefficient.
What 1% has to be worth
Here is the test you should hold us to. On $15 million of revenue, 1% is $150,000 a year. For that to be an obvious decision, we need to find and deliver several times that in cost removed, hours returned, or revenue made possible.
In practice the first year usually pays for itself in the unglamorous places: hours a team was spending re-entering the same data, a reconciliation nobody should be doing by hand, a process that was quietly leaking margin because nobody could see it end to end. Those are boring wins and they are measurable, which is the point.
This is also why we set the numbers we are aiming at before we start, and review them with you every six months. If we cannot show what moved, you should not renew.
The uncomfortable part
At the bottom of the range, 1% of revenue is less than a mid-level salary and it buys you a team. At the top, it is a serious commitment.
Below about $15 million in revenue, the minimum retainer is more than 1%, and we would rather be direct about that than dress it up. If the number does not make sense for where your business is right now, a fixed-price build through Amplify or a single Rapid Insight Workshop will serve you better. We will say so on the first call rather than the fourth.
What it does not buy
It does not buy unlimited work. It buys a team embedded in your business, a rolling plan we agree together, everything we build maintained while we are working with you, and our platform deployed at no extra cost.
And everything we build is yours. The code, the data, the repository. That matters more under a retainer than under a project, because you should be renewing because the work is good, not because leaving would cost you your software.
