The reason PR agency pricing feels opaque is that the industry has spent forty years selling a single number — 'the retainer' — that hides three completely separate line items. When a holding-company firm quotes $60,000/month, you are actually being asked to pay for senior time on your account, junior time on your account, and firm overhead (real estate, IT, layered management, staff development). Only the first line item produces coverage. The other two produce a P&L for the firm.

The most useful reframe is senior-applied dollars — the portion of your monthly retainer that funds hours worked by a senior operator on your specific account. In a senior-only remote firm, that number is typically 75–90% of the fee. In a holding-company network, it is typically 30–50%. On a $30,000/month retainer, that gap is $9,000–$18,000/month of senior time — the difference between three or four tier-1 pitches actually being made by a partner, and those same pitches being drafted by a coordinator and reviewed by a partner for fifteen minutes.

Ranges you can defend to a CFO: a starter program at $12,000–$20,000/month covers one primary announcement track (funding, product, category), reactive media relations, and light executive visibility. This is right-sized for a Series A/B company with a clear news calendar and an in-house marketing lead who owns brand. A category-building program at $25,000–$45,000/month adds analyst relations (Gartner, Forrester, IDC briefings), GEO/AI-citation work (Quotation-schema bylines, LLM citation benchmarking), and a monthly executive byline cadence. This is the standard shape for Series C/D and public-company programs that need to move share of narrative against three or five named competitors.

Enterprise scope at $45,000–$90,000/month adds crisis retainer (24/7 SLA, spokesperson training currency, dark-site status), multi-market execution, and something close to a full-time-equivalent senior operator embedded in your Slack. Above $90,000 you are typically paying for either global-network local-language capacity in 10+ markets, or holding-company overhead. If it's the latter, decompose the fee and ask why.

The most useful sanity check across all price points: cost per tier-1 placement, calculated annually. Take the total retainer paid in a twelve-month period, divide by tier-1 placements delivered (WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters, FT, TechCrunch, Forbes, Axios, The Information, plus category-specific tier ones), and compare. Senior-only B2B tech firms deliver a tier-1 for $8,000–$20,000 in blended retainer cost. Holding-company networks in the same category commonly run $30,000–$80,000 per tier-1. If your current program is above that range, the fee is being consumed by structure, not output.

One last cost trap: do not pay a monthly retainer for work that is either a one-time starter task (media list building) or better performed by a Perplexity query (junior 'research' hours). Every one of these is where retainer dollars quietly disappear. Ask each finalist to disclose their expected time allocation across senior execution, junior support, account management, and pass-through overhead — and eliminate any vendor that cannot answer.