Ask five agencies in Cairo what a social media retainer costs and you will get five numbers that don't overlap. Not because the market is irrational, but because none of them are pricing the same thing — and none of them will tell you which thing they're pricing.
There are only three models underneath every quote you will ever receive, and each one hides something different.
A retainer buys capacity: a set number of people's hours, every month, pointed at your account. It is the honest model when the work is ongoing and unpredictable in shape but predictable in volume — social, always-on media, ongoing development. What it hides is utilisation. If nobody tracks the hours, a retainer quietly becomes a subscription to being on a client list, and the month you needed the most attention looks identical on the invoice to the month you needed none.
A project price buys an outcome: a brand identity, a website, a launch campaign. It is honest when the scope is genuinely knowable in advance. What it hides is the change. Every project quote contains an assumption about how many rounds of revision are normal, and that assumption is almost never written down — which is why so many projects end in a conversation nobody enjoys.
A performance or commission model buys alignment: a percentage of media spend, or a share of revenue. What it hides is the incentive. A percentage of ad spend rewards spending more, not spending better, and the agency earning it has no financial reason to tell you your budget is already past the point of diminishing returns.
Now the number itself. An agency's price is built from four inputs and nothing else: the salaries of the people who will touch your account, how many hours of theirs you get, the overhead those salaries carry, and the margin the agency needs to survive a client leaving. That is the entire calculation. Anyone quoting you a figure that isn't derived from those four is either guessing or anchoring.
Which means the single most useful question you can ask is not 'how much' but 'who, and for how long'. A quote of X per month from an agency where a senior strategist spends eight hours on you is a different product from the same X where a junior spends forty — and it is not obvious in advance which one you want. Sometimes forty junior hours is exactly right. Sometimes eight senior hours is the whole value.
The second question: what happens in month four. Agency pricing is front-loaded by nature — the first month is setup, audit, access, strategy, and it is the month with the most work and the most visible output. Months four through twelve are where the relationship is actually tested, and where a badly-priced retainer quietly turns into a maintenance contract nobody renegotiated.
So: expensive versus overpriced. An expensive agency can show you where the money goes — which people, how many hours, what came out of them. An overpriced one answers that question with a deck. The number is not the tell. The ability to open the books is.
We publish this because it is the conversation we would rather have on the first call than the fourth. If a quote you're holding can't survive the questions above, that's worth knowing before you sign it — including if it's ours.