How concierge agencies charge: 4 pricing models

A retainer pays you to be available, not for the work

A monthly membership per member is the closest thing to a predictable business: you know what lands on the first, so you can staff against it. The market sits in three tiers. A few hundred dollars a month for entry memberships with one contact channel and a narrow scope. One to three thousand once there's a named person on the account and committed response times. Above that when the client expects after-hours availability and never wants to explain the same thing twice.

The retainer breaks precisely when the service is good. The faster you solve things, the more they ask, and every extra request comes out of the same flat number. Your best month of work is your worst month of margin. Quietly, your favorite client becomes the one who never texts, and a team hoping a client stays quiet has already mispriced the account.

So a retainer only holds up with a written cap: up to this many requests or this many hours a month, whichever comes first, and a stated price for anything past it. That's not stinginess. It's what prevents the awkward month-four conversation, when you're already doing triple the work and still haven't figured out how to bring it up.

Commission only brings you requests with a purchase inside

Commission comes from one of two places: the supplier pays you for the booking, or you mark up what the client spends. On hotels and vacation rentals, the supplier usually pays a commission; in plenty of other categories it doesn't exist at all and the client has to pay you directly. The distinction matters because it changes who you actually answer to.

The hidden cost is incentives. You earn more when the client spends more, and the client knows it. That casts a shadow over every recommendation you make, including the honest ones. The most honest recommendation of all, that the cheaper option is genuinely better for them, is the one that costs you money. And when a supplier pays nothing, that request quietly becomes less attractive to you. Clients feel that.

Then there's what commission does to your inbox. You only get requests with money inside them: trips, events, big purchases. Nobody calls you to renew a passport, wait for the appliance tech, or sort out a furniture delivery window. Those boring requests are exactly what keeps a client for three years instead of one.

Per-request pricing is the fairest and it cools the relationship

Charging per request or per hour is the fairest arrangement there is: you bill what you worked. It works especially well in three spots. With a new client whose usage pattern you haven't learned yet. With corporate accounts, who already live with hourly billing. And with large, predictable projects like a relocation or an event, where a fixed project fee agreed up front beats an hourly meter.

The cost is that the client starts thinking before reaching out. And a client who hesitates before texting eventually stops texting. The small requests go first, and small requests are cheap in your time and enormous in trust, because they're how you learn how that household actually runs. Once only the big requests are left, you're not their concierge anymore. You're a vendor they call occasionally.

Add the admin drag: quoting each request, defending hours, invoicing twenty line items, and arguing about why something took two hours instead of one. Per-request pricing earns its keep as the overage rate on a retainer, not as the whole model.

The client picks the blend, not the agency

The rule is to cross frequency against spend. High frequency, low spend, like a family with constant household logistics, calls for a capped retainer with hourly overage. Low frequency, high spend, like the client who travels three times a year, calls for commission or a fee per booking, because a retainer will feel like paying for nothing eleven months a year. One large dated project, like a relocation or a wedding weekend, calls for a fixed project price. And a brand-new client gets billed per request for two or three months before you ever quote a membership.

None of this can be decided without counting. How many requests each member sent last month, how long each one took, and who sits way off the average. I built a CRM for lifestyle and concierge agencies, and that number was exactly what was missing: the requests lived in WhatsApp threads and in one person's head. If that's your situation, fix the record before you touch the price, which is also the test for when a business needs a CRM.

Two things go in writing from day one: where every dollar you make comes from, including any commission a supplier pays you, and that pricing gets reviewed once a year against the year's numbers. The client who asked for triple the average doesn't get fired, they get repriced with the log on the table. You pick the pricing model, and in doing that you're picking what people will ask you for.