A typical agency conversation starts with “let's schedule a discovery call” because they need to qualify your budget before they can quote. We do it differently. The four policies below mean you can know more about how we work before the first call than most agencies will tell you after signing.
$80–$150/hr by department, ranges public.
Most agencies hide pricing because pricing forces them to defend it. We publish hourly rates by department (Strategy $120, Web Dev $150, Content $120, SEO $100, Paid $120, Outreach $100, AI-Augmented $80) and full retainer ranges. The bad-fit prospects self-qualify out before the discovery call. The good-fit ones come in ready.
See the pricing pageNo annual contracts. No cancellation fees. Ever.
Either party can end the engagement with 30 days written notice. No lock-in, no penalty, no friction. Most agencies require 12-month contracts because they need lock-in to retain you. We don't. The exit clause means we have to earn the work every month — and that's the point.
Read why we did thisEvery content piece carries an AI-assisted footer.
Every blog post, audit, and proposal carries a line: "AI helped draft this. [Author] reviewed and edited it. Their ideas, their voice, their sign-off." We don't hide that AI is in the workflow because hiding it would be a tell. The work is better when AI does the heavy lift and a human signs off — and you should know which is which.
Meet the agentsNothing important lives only in someone's head.
Client preferences, sprint outcomes, pricing decisions, style guides — everything goes into the brain. Future Blaine, future Becca, future agents all read the same memory. When you hire ANKR, you don't hire a person who could leave. You hire a system whose memory persists.
See the principlesMost of these aren't hard for an agency to do. They just don't. Here's the side-by-side.
| Dimension | ANKR | Typical agency |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly rates published | — | |
| Package ranges published | — | |
| 30-day exit clause | — | |
| 12-month contract required | — | |
| AI usage disclosed on content | — | |
| Sprint plans public | — | |
| Competitive research public | — | |
| Cancellation fees | — | |
| Discovery call required before pricing | — | |
| Quote-to-budget pricing | — |
We're not 100% open-book. There are three things we don't publish, on purpose.
We sign NDAs. The actual scope documents for Smiths or Longhorn or Paradigm are theirs, not ours to publish.
We say “we have 5–7 ride-or-die clients.” We don't list which paid what.
When we're running a 6-month outbound campaign for a client, we don't publish the cadence template until that campaign concludes. Otherwise competitors copy.
You've seen the pricing, the process, the agents, and the principles. The next step is a 30-minute walkthrough where we show you the system on actual screens. No deck. If the work doesn't fit, we'll tell you on the call.