A media audit is usually priced like a product: a few thousand dollars, sometimes less, sometimes offered free. That price is doing a lot of work, and it's not describing what the engagement is actually worth — it's describing an on-ramp.
The real engagement almost never stays a one-time project. It's a monthly retainer, commonly $2,500 to $10,000 or more, often on a six- or twelve-month minimum. A standalone paid-media audit might run around $5,000 per brand as a one-time exercise; a comparable full engagement — audit, ongoing management, reporting — realistically runs $12,000 to $25,000 just to get started, then the retainer is the business relationship on top of that. Run two brands and that's two scopes, so the honest comparison isn't a one-time $15,000. It's that, plus something on the order of $30,000 to $120,000 a year in retainer, with the audit-grade analysis bundled into the relationship rather than sold to you to keep and rerun yourself.
A lot of paid-social retainers are priced as a percentage of ad spend — usually 10 to 20%. Sit with that for a second: the agency's fee goes up when your spend goes up. That's not a minor detail. It means the exact kind of finding that's most valuable to catch — a single creative quietly absorbing most of a monthly budget at a loss — is precisely the kind of thing less likely to get flagged by someone whose fee scales with that budget staying high.
To be fair, a retainer isn't pure waste. Ongoing campaign management, creative production, and the day-to-day platform work are real jobs someone has to do. The issue isn't that agencies are overpriced for that work. It's narrower: the diagnostic and strategy layer — the expensive, high-margin part that used to be locked inside the retainer as the reason to sign it — is the piece that's now cheap and ownable on its own.
That reframes what an owner is actually choosing between. It's not audit versus no audit. It's whether the diagnostic work has to come bundled with a year-long retainer commitment, or whether it can be done on its own, on your own schedule, owned by you afterward. When a number needs to change or a new question comes up, owning the analysis means answering it that afternoon instead of waiting on a revised deck — and running the whole thing again next quarter costs an afternoon, not a renewed contract.
None of this is an argument against ever using an agency. It's an argument for knowing which part of what you're paying for is genuinely ongoing execution, and which part is a diagnostic you could be doing yourself.
Before you sign a retainer — new or renewed — it's worth finding out for yourself which part of that fee is buying execution and which part is buying a diagnosis you could already have. That's usually a shorter, cheaper conversation than people expect, and it's the one worth having before you commit to a year.
— Sach
