Is this cheaper than a normal retainer?

Not necessarily, and that’s not the point. If we do our job well, we make more than a flat retainer would have paid — because you made more too. If we don’t, you pay less.

What counts as qualifying revenue?

Agreed up front and written down — typically revenue through the channels and systems we build and operate, measured against the trailing baseline. No ambiguity, no surprises.

What if we already have strong revenue?

Then the baseline reflects it. We’re paid on the growth above it, not on the business you already built.

Do you do fixed-fee projects?

For defined scopes like a migration or a tooling build, yes. The revenue-share model is for ongoing growth engagements where we’re operating the machine.

Jump sections

Methodology / Revenue-Share Model

Most agencies get paid the same whether you grow or not.

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That’s the quiet flaw in the standard retainer. It buys effort, not outcomes — and it means the agency’s best month and your worst month can happen simultaneously. We structure engagements so that can’t happen: a retainer that covers the work, plus a share of the revenue we help create.

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A fixed retainer is a poor way to buy growth.

A fixed retainer is a reasonable way to buy time. It's a poor way to buy growth, because it rewards activity rather than results and creates incentives nobody actually wants: keep the deck impressive, keep the relationship pleasant, avoid the harder structural work that would take three months to pay off.

Pure commission has the opposite failure — it pushes toward short-term extraction, discount-led revenue, and whatever spikes fastest regardless of what it does to the brand or the margin. We tie our pay to sustained growth instead.

Revenue we help createOur shareFlat retainer (paid the same either way)

Three ways to pay an agency

Every pricing model rewards something. The question is whether what it rewards is what you actually want.

Model

What it rewards

The failure mode

Fixed retainer

Effort and hours

Paid the same whether you grow or not

Pure commission

Immediate revenue

Short-term extraction, margin damage

Retainer plus revenue share

Sustained growth

Requires real trust and clean data

How ours works

The specifics flex by engagement. The principle doesn’t.

A retainer

Covering the build and the operating work — the infrastructure, the flows, the tooling, the day-to-day execution. Real work costs real money, and pretending otherwise produces agencies that cut corners to survive.

A retainer

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A share of the revenue we help create

Measured against an agreed baseline — typically the trailing twelve months before we start — so we’re compensated on growth rather than on revenue that would have happened anyway.

A share of the revenue we help create

Measured against an agreed baseline — typically the trailing twelve months before we start — so we’re compensated on growth rather than on revenue that would have happened anyway.

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A minimum guarantee

In the early months, because infrastructure takes time to compound and neither party should be gambling on month one.

A minimum guarantee

In the early months, because infrastructure takes time to compound and neither party should be gambling on month one.

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What it requires

This model only works under conditions worth naming plainly.

Clean, shared measurement

If we can’t agree on what revenue is, we can’t share it. It’s part of why we build the tracking infrastructure first.

A real baseline

Growth measured against nothing is just revenue. We agree on the trailing period before starting.

Enough time to compound

Infrastructure pays off over quarters. Short engagements favor tactics that spike and fade.

Mutual honesty about fit

If your constraint is product, operations, or capital rather than marketing, a revenue share won’t fix it — and we’ll say so.

Why we prefer it.

It changes what we're willing to recommend. When our upside is tied to yours, the boring structural work — fixing attribution, rebuilding lifecycle flows, replatforming properly — becomes worth doing, because we benefit from the compounding rather than just billing the hours. It's the pricing expression of Build & Operate: if we're going to run the machine, we should be paid on what it produces.

Questionsbuyersask

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I've worked with Lightdrop on multiple projects over the last 5 years and am always amazed with the level of strategy, guidance and execution they bring to the table. Lior and his team are masters in digital and brand marketing.