The month-to-month model explained

Every arrangement between a store and a supplier has a risk in it: the work might not move the numbers. The contract length decides who holds that risk.

A long agreement moves it to you. The fee is committed, so a quarter where nothing improves costs you the money and the time, and your only remedy is a difficult conversation. That is why long agreements are commonly justified by talk of runway and ramp-up. Some of that reasoning is genuine, since certain work genuinely takes months to mature. Some of it is a way of buying time.

Month to month moves the risk to us. If the numbers do not move and we cannot explain why or say what changes next, you stop, and we lose the work. That is uncomfortable in the right way. It concentrates attention on the fixes with a readable result and on saying clearly when something did not land.

We are not claiming this is the only ethical model. We are saying it is ours, and that the pressure it creates points at the work rather than at renewal season.

The practical effect shows up in sequencing.

Without a locked term, there is no value in spending the first four weeks producing a strategy document. The diagnosis has already been written, free, in the plan. So month one is a fix, a measurement, a second fix and a report, which is the same rhythm as month six.

It also disciplines scope. Work that would take a quarter before producing any signal cannot be the only thing running, because you would be paying for three months of faith. So slow-maturing work such as search and repeat purchase flows starts early and runs in the background, while faster work on pages, feeds and checkout produces readings in front of it. That mix is good practice anyway. Month to month makes it compulsory.

And it kills the retainer that quietly becomes maintenance. When a scope is genuinely finished, there is no contract keeping it alive, and the honest conversation about whether there is enough left to do happens naturally rather than at the twelve month mark.

Because there is nothing to renew, the report has to do the job a contract would otherwise do.

So it is built to be decided with. One page. The four numbers, what moved, what we did that relates to the movement, and what is next. Comparisons against your own store rather than an industry figure, with a note when seasonality or a change in traffic mix is doing some of the work.

And it includes the failures. A month in which two of three changes did nothing is a normal month, and reporting it that way is the only way the next month's plan can be trusted. An agency that never reports a miss is either extraordinarily lucky or editing.

This is also why we keep the report short. Length is the easiest way to disguise a thin month, and a document designed to be skimmed by a busy owner cannot hide much. If you cannot tell from one page whether the month was worth the fee, the report has failed, whatever the arrangement says.

There are real costs to this model and it would be dishonest to list only the benefits.

The first is that some work compounds and stopping early forfeits the compounding. Search work and repeat purchase flows both accumulate. Leaving in month two with those half-built means you paid for the setup and left before the return. The plan should say which work has that shape so you can decide with your eyes open, and we say it before the work starts rather than when you want to stop.

The second is that a short horizon can bias anyone towards quick wins. We manage that by writing the order of fixes down in advance, in the plan, so the sequence was agreed when nobody was under pressure. It is a partial defence, not a perfect one.

The third is that month to month gives you no protection against us being busy elsewhere, in the way an annual commitment sometimes does in a store's mind. Our answer is scope: we quote for what we can actually deliver, and we would rather decline work than take on more than the month can hold.

You keep everything. That is not a courtesy, it follows from how the work is set up.

The store, the ad accounts, the Merchant Center, the analytics, the email platform and the domain are in your name throughout. We work inside them with access you granted, and you remove that access. Nothing needs to be transferred because nothing was ever ours.

The campaigns, feed rules, flows, page changes and templates stay where they are and keep running. The plan is yours, and so is every report. If you bring in someone else, they inherit a documented history of what was changed, when, and what it did, which is more than most handovers include.

We will also write down where things stand: what is running, what was half-built, what we would have done next and why. That takes an hour and it costs us nothing except the small discomfort of making it easy to leave.

If you come back later, that record is what makes restarting cheap.

Month to month suits most stores that already sell. It does not suit everyone, and there are a few cases where you should want something else.

If you need a fixed, budgeted annual cost signed off by a board a year in advance, an arrangement that can change every month is administratively awkward, even if the fee itself is stable.

If what you actually need is a large one-off build, a replatform or a full redesign, that is a project with a beginning and an end, and it should be scoped and priced as one rather than dripped through a monthly fee.

And if you want someone to commit to a revenue figure in exchange for a long commitment, we are not that supplier. We commit to the work, the measurement and an honest report. Nobody controls demand, competition or platform policy, and an arrangement built on promising those things has to hide something later.

What we offer instead is the ability to leave, which is a weaker promise on paper and a stronger one in practice.