Every marketing agency I researched in this market hides its pricing behind a "book a call to find out" button. Every single one. That is not an accident, it is a sales tactic, and it is worth understanding before you sit through the pitch.
Why Nobody Publishes Their Prices
The stated reason is that every engagement is different, which is true and is also true of plumbers, lawyers and dentists, most of whom manage to publish a starting figure anyway.
The real reasons are simpler. A number on a page lets you disqualify yourself before anyone gets to persuade you. It also lets you compare, and comparison is the thing a sales process is designed to delay until after you like the person on the call.
None of that makes an agency dishonest. But it does mean the first hour of your evaluation gets spent extracting information that could have been on a web page, and it means the number you are eventually quoted has been calibrated to what the call suggested you could afford.
What a Canadian Retainer Actually Costs
One industry pricing guide puts a typical Canadian business retainer at $2,000 to $6,000 a month, with full-service integrated programs running $5,000 to $15,000 (sourced from GrowthBoss). That is a single industry estimate rather than a government or association figure, so treat it as a guideline rather than definitive.
However, it is still useful. It is roughly the range you are being sized against even when nobody will say a number out loud.
The more helpful way to think about it is hours. A retainer buys a certain amount of a skilled person's month, and everything else is packaging. At a realistic senior rate, once an agency's overhead is covered, $1,500 a month buys somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen hours of actual work. That is my own estimate rather than a published benchmark, but it is the number worth holding in your head when a proposal lists twelve deliverables.
Twelve deliverables in ten hours is not a busy month. It is a thin month, described generously.
Three Red Flags Worth Walking Away From
Long contracts. A retainer that locks you in for a full year makes it expensive to leave a relationship that is not working, regardless of results. Twelve-month terms protect the agency's cash flow. They do nothing for your outcomes.
Vague deliverables. "We will handle your marketing" is not a deliverable. A contract should say which channels, at what frequency, and what specifically you will see in the monthly report.
Ad spend bundled into the management fee. If you cannot tell how much of your budget reaches customers and how much pays the agency, ask for the split in writing. A $1,500 retainer that quietly includes $800 of media is a $700 retainer.
To that I would add a fourth, which is less a red flag than an immediate end to the meeting: any guarantee of a ranking position or a number of leads. Nobody controls Google's index. Anyone promising a place in it is either misinformed or counting on you not to check.
Five Questions That Get You a Straight Answer
Walk me through a typical month, hour by hour. Who does each piece? An agency doing real work finds this easy. An agency selling a list does not.
Whose name are the accounts in? Your domain, hosting, Business Profile, analytics and ads accounts should be in your business's name, with the agency granted access. Not the reverse.
What happens in month one? Setup, audits and gathering access can legitimately consume the first month. That should be said out loud rather than discovered.
What does leaving look like? How much notice, what gets handed back, in what format.
What would make you tell me this is not working? The answer tells you whether you are buying a service or a subscription.
What mayans.STUDIO Charges
No call required to find this out.
Foundations, $997 a month. Google Business Profile setup, digital presence setup in the first month, an on-page SEO audit plus a monthly health check, a monthly performance report, and one strategy call a month.
Growth, $1,750 a month. The most popular tier. Everything in Foundations, plus two SEO blog posts a month, on-page optimisation of two pages a month, CRM monitoring where you already have a CRM, one landing page a quarter, and calls every two weeks.
Partner, quote-based from $3,500 a month. Full funnel work: brand strategy, website and e-commerce builds scoped as projects rather than folded into the retainer, paid ads across Google, Meta and LinkedIn, and fractional marketing leadership.
All prices in Canadian dollars. No annual contracts, on any tier, ever. The full breakdown of what each tier includes is on the pricing page.
One thing worth asking any agency, including this one, before signing: where email and CRM work is in scope, who is responsible for consent records. Every commercial electronic message you send in Canada needs consent, clear identification of the sender, and a working unsubscribe mechanism under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (sourced from the CRTC). If a proposal includes email campaigns and nobody can tell you who owns that obligation, that is worth resolving before the first send rather than after a complaint. General guidance rather than legal advice, and worth putting to counsel if email is a large part of your plan.
You will notice those numbers sit below the industry range quoted earlier. That is deliberate and it has a reason rather than a discount attached to it: this is one experienced person doing the work directly, with no account layer between you and the person making the decisions. That model has a ceiling, which is why Partner work is quote-based rather than a bigger monthly number.
What would you actually want to know before that first call?