The three pricing mistakes that turn a profitable white-label arrangement into break-even work, and how to structure around them.
White-label economics look simple. You pay a delivery cost, you mark it up, you keep the difference. Then six months in, the arrangement is barely profitable and nobody can quite say why.
A cost-plus markup anchors your price to your vendor’s rate card, which has nothing to do with what the work is worth to your client. Agencies who price this way end up competing on the vendor’s cost structure rather than their own positioning.
Price against the outcome and the relationship. The delivery cost is your margin input, not your pricing basis.
The extra report, the ad-hoc analysis, the "quick" landing page. Individually trivial, collectively the difference between 40% margin and 15%.
The fix is not to refuse — it is to make the scope visible. When the extra request is logged against the account, the pattern becomes obvious and the conversation about a scope change happens naturally rather than after you have quietly eaten six months of it.
A clean account on a stable budget takes a fraction of the effort of a messy multi-location rollout. Charging both the same means the easy accounts subsidize the hard ones, and your incentive quietly becomes to avoid the work that grows fastest.
Tier by complexity, not by spend. Publish what is in and out of scope. Review the account list quarterly and reprice the ones that have drifted. None of this is clever — it is just done consistently, which is rarer than it should be.
Send the shape of what you are carrying — how many accounts, which channels, where it hurts. We will come back with specifics.