What per-account pricing actually does to an agency
When a tool charges per account, the agency unconsciously absorbs the incentive. New tool subscription? Wait until the client roster justifies it. Account churned? Trim the tool seats. Onboarding a small client? The cost of the tool becomes part of the deal math, sometimes pricing the client out.
The second-order effect is uglier. Per-account pricing means the tool wants you to have more accounts, not necessarily better accounts. And the operator on the ground — the strategist actually running the work — is invisible to the tool's pricing page. The person doing the work pays the same as the person hiring others to do the work.
Per-account pricing
- Tool revenue scales with accounts
- Onboarding a small client is a tax
- Churn hits the tool bill the same week
- Strategist headcount is invisible
- Cost grows faster than capacity
Per-strategist pricing
- Tool revenue scales with operators
- Adding an account is free
- Churn does not change the tool bill
- Strategist headcount is the unit
- Cost grows when capacity grows
Why we landed on per-strategist
The first question we asked, before pricing, was: what does the buyer want our tool to make scarce? For an agency, the scarce resource is not accounts. Accounts are easy to win in the right vertical. The scarce resource is strategist attention. One operator can run 8 accounts on willpower, 12 with discipline, and 22 with the right system. The bottleneck is the human, not the slot count.
If the tool's job is to expand a strategist's capacity, the tool should be priced on the strategist's capacity. That logic survived every internal challenge we threw at it.
What surprised our team
The first surprise was internal. When we removed per-account pricing, we expected the team to celebrate. They did, for a week. Then they noticed something we did not: the pressure to onboard "easy" small accounts (the ones that barely paid for the tool fee) disappeared. Capacity got reallocated to the larger, more complex accounts where their work actually moved the business. Two of the smaller accounts churned. Three of the larger ones renewed up.
Net effect, six months in: fewer accounts, higher retainer, less Monday-morning fatigue, same revenue. We had been tax-paying on small clients to subsidize the tool stack without realizing it.
What surprised our clients
Some of them noticed. The CMO of one of our largest accounts asked, in passing, whether we had quietly raised her retainer. We had not — the line item on her invoice was unchanged. What had changed was the depth of work she was getting from her strategist. With the tool tax gone and the briefcase automating the rote review, her strategist had two more hours a week to spend on her account. She felt it before she saw it.
The clients who churned in the same period were not the ones we feared. They were the ones we should have churned ourselves a year earlier — low retainer, high touch, no strategic upside. The pricing change forced a conversation that should have happened earlier.
What surprised our accountant
This is the part everyone wants to skip and shouldn't. Per-strategist pricing made the books simpler. No more reconciling tool seats against active accounts every month. No more renegotiating vendor contracts when an account churned mid-quarter. The tool stack became a fixed cost line that moved only when the team moved.
Our accountant, who had spent the previous two years asking us to "stabilize the cost of tools", stopped asking.
What it does to retention
The retention story is the part advisors warned us about. Their worry: if the tool is not per-account, the buyer can hide its real usage. They could spin up forty accounts on one seat and pay for one strategist's worth.
In practice, this does not happen. The buyer is an operator. They know what their team can run. A strategist trying to manage 40 accounts produces bad work, loses clients, and burns out. The market polices the abuse case for us. The healthy buyer pays for one strategist and runs 15 to 22 accounts. The unhealthy buyer pays for one strategist, tries to run 40, churns out of the tool inside 90 days because the system does not save them from themselves.
One year in:
| Metric | Year 1 |
|---|---|
| Gross dollar retention | 108% (net of churn, including expansion) |
| Logo retention | 91% |
| Median strategists per buyer | 2.4 |
| Median accounts per strategist | 17 |
| Buyers who tried to game the seat count | 3 (all churned within 90 days) |
The retention is better than every per-account benchmark we benchmarked against. The reason is structural, not surprising: the tool is priced on the same unit the buyer thinks in.
What we'd push back on if you tried this
Per-strategist pricing is not free money. Two warnings if you are considering it for your own product:
1. Your unit of value must actually be the operator
If your tool's value is "more accounts at the same quality," per-account makes sense. If your tool's value is "more capacity per operator at the same quality," per-strategist makes sense. Picking the wrong unit will hurt you on day one and every day after.
2. You will lose deals to per-account competitors
Buyers comparing line items will sometimes choose the per-account quote even when the per-strategist quote is cheaper at their actual usage. The fix is not to switch your pricing. The fix is to show the buyer the math in their own data on the demo call.
3. Expansion math is different
You do not expand by onboarding more accounts. You expand when the buyer hires another strategist. That is a slower clock. Make peace with it on day one or do not try this.
The takeaway
Price on the unit of value, not the unit of inventory. For PPC agencies, the unit of value is the operator. For e-commerce platforms, it is probably the order. For analytics tools, it is probably the seat. The vendor whose pricing matches the buyer's actual constraint is the one who survives renewal.
The version we ship today
actcenter pricing is on the pricing page, but the short version: one price per strategist seat, unlimited accounts, no per-MCC fee, no overage charge for adding a campaign. The pilot is two strategists, free for the duration of the pilot, on a real subset of your portfolio so you can see the math before you commit.