Agency peeps: Do you pass on the cost of tools you use (like Sprout) to your clients?

That’s a great question, @msannagrace. Welcome to the Agency Partners Group! 

I know @Brooke B. Sellas, @raven.gill, @michelle.hughes, @mary will have have some great insights to share here, so tagging them in. Also, pretty sure everyone in this group has some useful tips and relatable anecdotes to share in this context - perks of being in the company of your fellow agency peers! 😀 

@msannagrace Here is an answer you won’t like….. 🤣

It depends! 

It really does depend. We customize what is in scope for each client depending upon their needs. For some clients, we have a retainer with a certain number of billable hours allowed. For those, it isn’t spelled out. We make sure the retainer is enough to cover the hours we think we’d spend in the platform. For others, if we are specifically using the platform for them (aka - we do their publishing, reporting, listening, and/or community management, etc.), then yes. We would pass on their portion of our cost to them. Then we also have clients where we referred them to Sprout Social (or they already use Sprout Social) and we have a user seat in THEIR platform. Then it comes back to billable hours. I will also add that although I wouldn’t consider Acronym a HUGE agency, I’d also say we aren’t a super small one either. So we can spread the cost amongst the clients we use Sprout for in different ways. Also, don’t forget the Partner program. We haven’t had a year yet where we haven’t referred a client to Sprout Social and that will bring down the cost as well.

@msannagrace for the most part, yes. We have a set number of deliverables for a set monthly fee, customized for the needs of each client. Baked into those fees are business operating costs, like Sprout. So we don’t have a line item that says “Sprout Social” with a cost associated. We just have a flat fee that covers our social media services, including scheduling, publishing, monitoring & reporting, all of which is done through Sprout.

This means clients can’t say “I don’t want to pay for Sprout” and force us to use a different platform, but it also means when Sprout prices increase, we can’t pass that along to our clients unless we do a fee increase. So, pros and cons!

@msannagrace My answer is very similar to @mary’s! We have enough clients that the cost is spread around and pretty standard in agreements where the client is using our instance of Sprout. However, we have some clients who are not using Sprout and therefore it’s not really “counted” towards their retainers. For add-ons, like social listening, we make it very clear that they are using Sprout SL through us and therefore can receive partner pricing (cheaper than what it would cost at market rates) and those terms, like Sprout’s, lock the client into a one year agreement to “rent” the SL.

Hope that makes sense!

Thank you all so much, this is great! I appreciate it. :)

@Brooke B. Sellas @michelle.hughes @raven.gill @mary 

We’ve come up with a package cost for the service for one (1) user and three (3) social profiles, with upcharges for additional users and profiles that can be added monthly like @raven.gill. Clients like this because our base package pricing is quite a bit less than retail for Advanced level service. This is a source of evergreen revenue for us, whether or not we’re actively managing their daily socials.