When an agency puts a number in front of you, the line you read is the project: visual identity, campaign, website. What sits underneath that line rarely appears — and that's where most of the price difference between one model and another lives.
This isn't an exposé. An agency doesn't hide its structure out of bad faith; it simply doesn't itemise it, because nobody itemises the office electricity. But the person paying has an interest in knowing what they're buying.
Four things in the price that aren't the work
Coordination. Someone has to talk to you, translate what you said for whoever executes it, and bring back what was made. In an agency that's a named role — account, project manager — and it costs by the hour like any other.
Approval. The work passes through layers before it reaches you. A creative director reviews what the designer made, an art director checks the final artwork. Those reviews exist to protect quality, and each of them has time inside it.
Sales. The project you bought was sold by someone, probably in a meeting with a deck built for the occasion. That commercial effort spreads across the projects that close, and yours pays its share.
Structure. The office, the software licences, the accounting, the team that isn't allocated to anything this week but has to be there next week. All of it is real and has to come from somewhere.
When that's worth what it costs
There are projects where this structure isn't fat — it's what makes the work happen at all.
A campaign with fifteen people involved, three external suppliers and an immovable air date needs full-time coordination. An account that requires someone available every day, to answer within two hours a request that landed at nine in the morning, needs a team on standby. Work where legal responsibility has to sit with a single entity needs an entity capable of carrying it.
In those cases, hiring loose pieces and coordinating them yourself costs more — in money or in wear. And anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
When it isn't
Most projects aren't like that.
Most need two or three very good people, for a few weeks, with a clear brief and a fast decision. There, every layer you add is a layer between you and whoever does the work — and layers cost money and time in equal measure.
That's the space Scallent exists in. We're not cheaper because we're weaker: we're cheaper because we removed what wasn't adding anything to that particular project.
What stays in our price
Something always stays, and it's worth saying so.
Our commission is 20%, transparent and always the same. It pays for curation — finding, assessing and maintaining the pool —, for the market consultation that gets your brief to the right people, and for our contractual responsibility over the work.
What it doesn't pay for is an account manager coordinating on your behalf, or an office, or a layer of approval you didn't ask for. If you need those things, that's a sign you need an agency — and we'll tell you so.
You can see the cost structure side by side on The model, which also has a simulator. It's worth an order of magnitude and nothing more: it isn't a quote and it doesn't commit us to anything.
