Agency Pricing (Scope-Based)
Caleb Ulku’s delivery-cost pricing: break the work into components, attach real costs, add 50–70% gross margin, quote that — not a competitor’s rate card.
Definition
From Pricing Framework (with Examples): most agencies copy what competitors charge and then have unpredictable margins. Scope-based pricing itemizes setup (Claude/custom-GPT project, client sheet, GBP + landing-page audits, LeadSnap) and per-article production (writer, Schema Markup (Structured Data), AI images, external PBN link, publisher, QA, internal-link pass). Setup is rolled into month one (~5 articles), not billed separately; month two+ is ~9 articles. Linear scale for standard Core 30 production; custom quotes when the site is technically broken (his example: 500 URLs ranking ~20 at the pin).
The PBN line item is the wiki-relevant contradiction: this lesson treats a private-blog-network link as a standard per-article cost, while the rest of his corpus (and Local Link Building & Authority) treats manipulated-DR / PBN-style links as harmful. Record both; do not average.
Key Properties
- Price from cost + margin, not “the market.”
- Unit of ongoing work = fully loaded article, including a paid external link.
- 50–70% gross margin as a buffer for unscoped revisions.
- Good/better/best tiers; margin % may fall as dollar volume rises; never unprofitable.
- Do not use per-article pricing to hide a site rebuild.
Examples from Sources
| Example | Source |
|---|---|
| Month 1 = setup + ~5 articles; month 2+ = ~9; “external PBN link cost per article” | Pricing Framework (with Examples) |
In the Sources
| Source | Context |
|---|---|
| Pricing Framework (with Examples) | Full cost stack and packaging. |
Related
Concepts: Core 30, Three-Step Method (Low-Competition Ranking Method), Local Link Building & Authority, Schema Markup (Structured Data), 8-Pass AI Writing Pipeline Entities: Caleb Ulku, LeadSnap, Claude