Comparison · Retainer agency
A retainer gets paid whether the market answers or not.
Per-meeting billing puts that risk on the vendor instead. That is the whole argument. The rest of this page is the mechanism.
No retainer, no minimum, no annual contract, no setup fee.
67% of the companies who tried this said it didn't work.
- Really worked
- 7%
- Sort of worked
- 26%
- Did not work
- 67%
it's hard to outsource your corethe reason given in the SaaStr survey
What each model is paid for
| What happened that month | What a retainer invoices | What we invoice |
|---|---|---|
| The work ran and no meetings came of it | The full monthly fee | €0 |
| Meetings were booked and half of them nobody attended | The full monthly fee | Only the meetings that were held and met the rubric |
| Meetings were held with people two levels below the agreed seniority | The full monthly fee | €0 for those. They fail the rubric. |
| The market simply doesn't reply to this product at this price | The full monthly fee, to the end of the minimum term | €0, and you stop. |
Under a retainer, the risk that the market does not answer sits with you. Under per-meeting billing it sits with us. That is the entire argument.
"It's hard to outsource your core." They're right.
That was the reason the 67% gave, and it is the strongest objection on this page. We are not going to argue with it, because it is true.
So we did not build an answer to that objection. We built the arrangement to end. Not to renew.
How this is designed to stop.
Three stages. You move between them when the evidence says to, or you stay on the first one indefinitely. The terms do not get worse as you go.
Prove
One market. Pay per qualified meeting. No commitment.
No retainer. No minimum. No annual contract.
Scale
A named rep assigned to your campaign in each market you add.
Still per meeting. Still no retainer, no minimum, no annual contract.
Own
When a market works, we introduce the person who ran it as a permanent hire.
The campaign terms do not change until you decide they should.
Permanent hires
And the work is yours the whole way through, not at the end
- Target listsCSV
- SequencesCSV and Markdown
- RecordingsMP3, one file per call
- TranscriptsVTT and plain text
- The rubric, as it evolvedPDF and Markdown
- Meeting recordsCSV plus a PDF per meeting
- Objection logCSV
seven assets, exportable on any working day.
The rubric your meetings are scored against, the 5 working days you have to flag one, and the 48 hours we have to answer are all published before your campaign starts. What you keep, in full · How a permanent hire works.
Four complaints come up in almost every one of these conversations.
We hear the same four from people who have already run this play once. None of them is about effort, and none of them requires anybody to have acted in bad faith.
What buyers report, why the model allows it, and where to check ours.
| What buyers report | Why the model allows it | What we do instead | Check it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meetings that nobody attended, billed as meetings. | The fee is monthly, so a booked meeting and a held meeting cost the vendor exactly the same. Attendance becomes the buyer's problem the moment the invite goes out. | Attendance is one of the six criteria. A meeting nobody attended fails, and a meeting that fails is not invoiced. | The standard |
| No clear number for how many booked meetings were actually held. | Nothing in the contract requires the held rate to be reported, because nothing in the contract prices it. | Every meeting carries its score, the recording, and a citation for each criterion. The held meetings are the invoice — there is no other number to report. | The standard |
| Quality that depends on which pod you happened to be assigned. | Capacity is pooled across clients, so the work is done by whoever is free that week, and nobody publishes what those people passed before they started. | Certification gates are published, sequential, and per market and per campaign. The same rubric is applied for every client in every market. | What a rep passes |
| Limited access to your own sequences and lead lists — during the engagement, and after it. | The work runs in the vendor's tooling, so the asset is theirs by default and access is a favour rather than a term. | Lists, sequences, recordings, transcripts and every version of the rubric are exportable on any working day, from day one. | What you control |
These are grievances documented across this category. They are not claims about any particular company. We have not named one and we are not going to.
The monthly fee is not the number to argue about.
Retainers in this category run €8,000–€15,000 per month, on a 3–6 month minimum that usually renews unless somebody remembers to stop it.
None of those charges is hidden in the sense of being concealed. They are in the contract. They are hidden in the sense that they were not in the number you were quoted on the call.
What a retainer costs before anything is booked.
Market ranges, not quotes. Euro figures are European costs. Dollar figures are US category norms, quoted in USD because that is how the category quotes them.
- Committed before you know anything
- €24,000–€90,000 in minimum fees alone
- Payable in a month with no meetings
- The full monthly fee, €8,000–€15,000 per month
The minimum-term commitment only: 3 months at the bottom of the monthly range, 6 at the top. A full 12 months at those rates is €96,000–€180,000 twelve months.
Charges this category adds as standard
| Charge | Category norm | KLAR |
|---|---|---|
| Setup fee | US$3,000–US$10,000 one-off | €0 |
| Tooling add-ons | US$500–US$1,500 per rep per month | €0 |
| Minimum term | 3–6 months | None |
| Early-termination fee | 2–3 months' fees | None |
| Annual contract | Standard | None |
| Renewal increase | At renewal | There is no renewal |
Where a retainer is the better buy.
Five of them. The last one is a genuine limit on what we sell, not a polite concession, and we would rather you hit it here than three months into a campaign.
If any of these describe you, a retainer is not a mistake.
The two options, side by side.
Predictable budgeting
A retainer is one number a month, forecastable a year out, and it doesn't move when the market does. Per-meeting billing moves with what the market does, which is honest and inconvenient in equal measure. If your finance team needs a fixed line, say so on the first call — it is a real reason to choose differently.
Reserved capacity whether you need it or not
You are paying to hold people against a month you might not use. That has genuine value in a seasonal business, or when a launch date might slip and you want the team ready either way. We release capacity you are not using, and getting it back takes about 14 days.
Time to learn a genuinely complex product
A vendor paid monthly can afford to spend 8 weeks learning your product before booking anything. We are paid per qualified meeting, so a long unpaid learning period is a cost we carry — and past a certain point we would decline the campaign rather than carry it and quietly under-serve you.
Scope beyond meetings
Retainers often bundle content, inbound, list building, lifecycle and reporting into one engagement with one contact. We do one thing: qualified meetings, in market, in the language. If you need the rest, we are not the whole answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Enterprise sales where the first meeting is months away
If the meeting you want is 6 months of nurture away — a committee, a procurement cycle, an RFP — then most of the value is created before anything is bookable, and a model that only pays on meetings will pull towards the ones that book soonest. That is a real weakness of what we sell. On that shape of sale, a retainer funds the work that per-meeting pricing doesn't.
| What you are comparing | A retainer SDR agency | KLAR | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you commit to | A 3–6 month minimum, usually auto-renewing. | Nothing. No retainer, no minimum, no annual contract. | Advantage: KLAR |
| What you pay before the first meeting | Setup or onboarding, commonly US$3,000–US$10,000 one-off, plus the first month. | €0. No setup fee, no onboarding fee, no data, list or tooling fee. | Advantage: KLAR |
| What a month with no meetings costs | The full fee. | €0. | Advantage: KLAR |
| Budget predictability | One number a month, forecastable a year out. | Moves with what the market does. | Advantage: retainer |
| Capacity in a month you don't need it | Reserved and paid for, ready when you do. | Released. Changes in either direction take 14 days. | Advantage: retainer |
| Time it can afford before booking anything | Paid monthly, so a long learning period is affordable. | Paid per meeting, so we carry it — and past a point we would decline the campaign. | Advantage: retainer |
| Scope | Often content, inbound, lists and reporting in one engagement. | Qualified meetings only, in market, in the language. | Advantage: retainer |
| A sale where the first meeting is 6 months of nurture away | The model funds the nurture. | The model doesn't pay for it, and we would rather say so than take the campaign. | Advantage: retainer |
| Who defines "qualified" | The vendor, usually after signature. | A published rubric of six criteria, written before your campaign existed, identical for every client in every market. | Advantage: KLAR |
| What happens to a meeting that fails it | Invoiced anyway — the fee was monthly. | Voided before the invoice is raised, and replaced at no charge. If we'd already invoiced it, you get a credit note. | Advantage: KLAR |
| Who holds the lists and the sequences | The vendor's tooling, by default. | Yours throughout. Exportable on any working day, including the last one. | Advantage: KLAR |
| Where it ends | Renewal. | An introduction to a permanent hire, at a published placement fee. | Advantage: KLAR |
- The retainer column describes the structure this category sells, from published ranges and documented terms. It is not a description of any particular company, and individual agreements vary in every row.
- There is no cost-per-meeting row in this table. Filling it in would require a delivery figure for both columns, and we don't publish one we can't stand behind or guess at somebody else's to make ours look better.
Start with one market and stop whenever you like.
One of 34. No retainer, no minimum, no annual contract, no setup fee. You pay for meetings that qualify against a rubric that was published before your campaign existed, and a meeting you dispute is a meeting you don't pay for.