TL;DR

• NEW SURVEY: The 2Q26 launches tomorrow. Join Delphi to learn what's impacting agency sales pipelines.
• REQUEST: We'd love to include some quotes from agency leaders in our upcoming Digital Agency Industry Report. Reply to this email with your take on some prompts to be considered.
• NEW RESEARCH: Get the latest agency benchmarks in our State of Digital Services Report! Growth rates, margins, AI use, hourly rates, M&A activity, and more.
• There isn’t a single best pricing model for digital agencies. The better question is which model fits the type of shop you actually run.
• Marketing agencies lean towards retainers, Design agencies lean towards project-based, Dev. agencies are split across time-and-materials, project work, and retainers, and Blended agencies are the most fragmented.
• That pattern fits the work: recurring marketing services suit retainers, discrete design outcomes suit projects, and dev. work usually needs more than one pricing logic.
• Value-based pricing still looks like a niche choice as we found only 18% of agencies used it in 2025, and that group underperformed agencies using more standard models.
• The Blended segment's pricing preferences are the most spread out, which lines up with the report’s finding that focused agencies outgrew Blended shops.
• The operating takeaway is: benchmark pricing against agencies built like yours, not against whoever's the loudest out there right now.

Second Quarter Agency Pipeline Survey

We do quarterly pulse checks on agency pipelines to measure how the agency world is tracking, and then we share what we find with Delphi members.

The 2Q26 survey goes live 4/1 and is open through 4/10.

​Join Delphi.​

Take the survey.

Get the results and make more informed decisions.

Quotes for our 2026 Digital Agency Industry Report

We're putting the finishing touches on this year's Digital Agency Industry Report, and it'd be great to get agency leader perspectives on what you're seeing out there.

If you'd like to participate: Reply to this email for any 1-2 prompts below in 2-4 sentences. Strong opinions and specific examples are especially helpful. Please include a link to your LinkedIn page so we can grab name/title/headshot/agency name/etc. Selected responses may be included in the final report, and we may lightly edit for length and clarity.

1. How do you think about positioning today? What actually makes an agency meaningfully different in 2026?
2. Which services feel more strategic than they did a year ago, and which feel more exposed or commoditized?
3. What change have you made to your service mix recently, and what drove that decision?
4. How has AI changed the way your team delivers work internally?
5. How has AI changed the value clients expect from your agency?
6. What has changed most in client buying behavior or expectations over the last 12 months?
7. How are you thinking about pricing in today’s market? Where are clients pushing back, and where can agencies still defend premium pricing?
8. As an agency grows, what usually breaks first in the operating model?

We'll accept responses through EoD on Thursday, 4/2.

Pricing Models Follow Agency Archetypes

Agency pricing conversations tend to get treated like there’s a single best answer.

There isn’t.

Our 2026 State of Digital Services Report already showed that most shops use some mix of time and materials, project-based pricing, and retainers. It also showed that value-based pricing fell to 18% of agencies in the survey in 2025 and underperformed more standard models.

Once you break the data out by archetype, the patterns become pretty intuitive:

• Marketing agencies lean hard toward retainers, with 45% preferring them.
• Design agencies favor project-based pricing at 41%.
• Dev. agencies are nearly evenly split across time and materials, project-based, and retainers.
• Blended agencies are the most spread out and show the highest preference for value-based pricing, though that model is still a minority choice there too.

That’s the interesting part.

It suggests pricing model preference is really a question of service fit.

Marketing shops often sell ongoing execution and optimization. Retainers fit that kind of value delivery naturally. Design shops tend to sell more discrete transformations, so project-based pricing makes more sense. Dev. shops usually have to manage a mix of scoped builds, fluid requirements, change requests, and recurring support, so it makes sense that no single model dominates. The even split reads like the commercial reflection of a more complicated delivery model.

This also lines up with the broader performance story in the report. Design agencies were the fastest-growing archetype and also had the highest net margins. Dev. agencies grew quickly but had the lowest margins. Marketing agencies grew slightly slower than average, and Blended agencies lagged behind.

The Blended group is probably the most revealing part of the chart. Their pricing preferences are the most fragmented, which makes sense given their broader service mix. But we also showed that focused agencies outgrew Blended agencies, and that agencies that reduced services delivered standout results on both growth and margin. That makes the pricing spread here worth paying attention to. In some cases, pricing complexity is a form of commercial flexibility. In others, it’s a sign that the business has a positioning issue.

The practical takeaway is pretty simple: Owners shouldn’t be asking, “What’s the best pricing model?” They should be asking, “What pricing model fits the type of value we deliver?”

If you’re a marketing shop trying to force project logic onto recurring work, or a design shop trying to retainerize work that clients want to buy as discrete outcomes, you’re creating friction. And if you’re a blended agency using four different pricing logics across the business, it may be worth asking whether that’s a strength or a symptom.

Finally, if you're doing anything and selling it on a value-based approach, you need to be absolutely dialed in to your prospect's expectations around AI, because a ton of people now believe certain work should be free.

Pricing's one of, if not THE biggest lever an agency can pull to improve performance. Hopefully, this additional detail and the full State of Digital Services report help you optimize this a bit more.

Until next time!

-Nick