What UA creative agencies charge and why

UA creative agencies price their work four ways: per asset, per month on a retainer, as a percentage of media spend, or as a hybrid that bolts a performance bonus onto a base retainer. Which one is cheapest matters less than which one fits what your team actually needs, whether that's raw volume, a fixed monthly capacity, or an incentive that ties the agency's income to campaign results.

Each model exists because it solves a different buyer problem, and most of the arguments between studios and agencies trace back to a mismatch between the model chosen and the thing the studio actually needed.

How do UA creative agencies price their work?

Per-asset pricing charges a fixed rate for each delivered piece and scales roughly linearly with volume: a static image, a video variant, a playable build, each at its own rate. It suits studios that know their concept needs but want the flexibility to turn the tap up or down month to month without a standing commitment.

A retainer charges a fixed monthly fee for an agreed capacity of work, regardless of exactly how many assets that capacity produces in a given month. Studios that want predictable output and a dedicated team rather than a transactional relationship tend to land here.

Percentage-of-spend pricing charges a share of the media budget the creative supports, which aligns the agency's revenue with how much the studio spends on distribution rather than with creative output directly. It turns up in full-service arrangements where the agency also touches media buying. The appeal for both sides is that it scales up automatically as a campaign grows, with no separate renegotiation.

Performance bonus and hybrid models layer an incentive on top of a base fee, paying more when a defined metric clears an agreed bar, often hook rate, cost per install, a retention threshold. These are less standardised than the other models. What counts as a qualifying result matters far more than the headline structure does.

What does per-asset pricing look like in practice?

A single static image sits at the low end of any rate card. It takes the least production time and carries no motion or sound work at all. A short non-playable video variant costs meaningfully more, since that rate has to cover a script and an edit as well as sound design, plus whatever the shooting or generation costs. A fully built and tested playable ad sits at the top. It drags in interactive design as well as multi-network builds and QA across devices, which is work that a video or a static asset never touches.

Industry rate-card surveys and public agency pricing pages, where they exist, generally frame these three tiers as widening bands rather than fixed points, and the spread between the cheapest static and the most expensive playable can run to an order of magnitude. So treat any single number quoted without a tier as incomplete information. Ask which asset type it refers to before setting it against another agency's headline rate.

When does a retainer make more sense than per-asset pricing?

A retainer earns its keep when a studio needs a consistently available team rather than an unpredictable stream of one-off requests. Live-service games with an established creative cadence are the clearest fit, where the same concepts need refreshing on a schedule tied to a content calendar, because continuity of people who understand the game is worth more to that studio than shopping each batch competitively.

The trade-off is utilisation risk.

A retainer priced for a fixed capacity costs the same whether the studio uses all of it or not, so it suits a stable, forecastable workload better than a spiky one. Studios running occasional bursts, a single launch campaign or a seasonal push, usually get better value from per-asset pricing scoped to that burst.

Why do some agencies charge a percentage of media spend?

Percentage-of-spend pricing is most common where the same agency also manages or advises on media buying, since it lets the fee grow with the account without a separate creative invoice to negotiate each time. It can also work as a proxy for effort, on the theory that a bigger media budget implies more creative iteration to keep pace with fatigue.

The risk for the buyer is that the fee ties only loosely to creative output. A studio spending heavily on media while running a stable, low-churn creative slate can end up paying disproportionately for work that has barely changed. Buyers on this model should ask for a cap or a floor tied to actual delivered assets rather than accept an open-ended percentage.

How do I compare two very different quotes fairly?

Normalise everything to a cost per delivered unit first. A retainer quote and a per-asset quote only become comparable once you divide the retainer's monthly fee by the number of assets it's scoped to produce in a typical month, and even then the comparison should carry a note that a retainer usually buys team continuity a per-asset quote doesn't.

Ask each agency what happens outside the scoped volume, whether that's overage pricing on a retainer or a minimum monthly commitment on per-asset terms, since the headline number rarely tells you what a real, uneven month costs. And separate the pricing model from the quality question entirely. The cheapest model on paper isn't the cheapest engagement. Not if the work needs a second round of revisions the contract never anticipated, so read the pricing structure alongside the revision terms before deciding which quote actually costs less.

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