Go look up five veterinary marketing agencies tonight. Not the ones I'd pick — any five. Check their pricing pages.
When I did this across the category, three of five had no published price at all. A form, a "book a discovery call" button, sometimes a "plans starting at" number attached to a plan nobody buys. The two that publish real numbers cluster in a band: roughly $1,500 to $5,000 a month for specialist veterinary marketing, frequently plus a percentage of your ad spend, frequently on a six-to-twelve-month contract.
The hidden three aren't shy. Their sites are loud about everything else — team photos, client counts, award badges. The one number a practice owner actually needs to plan a budget is the one thing withheld.
That's not an accident, and it's worth understanding exactly what "call for pricing" does before you're on that call.
What the call is for
When a price isn't published, it isn't fixed. That's the whole mechanism.
A discovery call runs a familiar sequence: questions about your practice size, your revenue, your current marketing spend, your growth goals. Some of those questions genuinely inform strategy. But notice that every one of them also calibrates something else — what you can afford. By the time the quote arrives, it has been fitted to the answers you gave, not to the cost of the work.
This is why two nearly identical practices can come off calls with the same agency holding quotes hundreds of dollars apart. The work didn't change. The read on the buyer did.
The industry's defense is that every practice is different, so pricing has to be custom. For genuinely bespoke work — a ground-up brand, a complicated multi-location rollout — that can be true. For the service most of these agencies actually sell — Google Ads management plus a website on their platform — the work is far more repeatable than the pricing conversation implies. The variance isn't in the labor. It's in the quote.
What opacity costs you, specifically
Three things, and they compound.
You can't comparison shop. With no published numbers, assembling three comparable quotes means three discovery calls, three pitches, three follow-up sequences. Most practice owners don't have the hours, so most don't compare — which is the point.
The anchor gets set on their terms. On a call, the first number you hear frames every number after it. A $3,000 opener makes $2,200 feel like a concession. If the numbers were public, the anchor would be the market. On the call, the anchor is whatever they open with.
Percentage-of-spend hides a second price. Many agencies in the band charge a management fee plus a cut of your ad budget — commonly 10–20%. Read that arrangement plainly: the agency earns more when you spend more on ads, whether or not the additional spend produces additional patients. When the person advising you on budget size profits from budget size, "you should increase spend" stops being pure advice.
None of this makes those agencies incompetent at the craft. Some run good campaigns. But the pricing structure is a decision, and it's a decision made against the buyer's interest, before any work begins.
Our whole bill
Here is everything Animaclarus charges, the same numbers that sit on the homepage:
$750 a month for Google Ads management. Flat. A separate campaign for each service you offer. Month to month — no contract. If it doesn't work in your first 60 days, the management fee comes back.
$0 for your website. Built, with a dedicated landing page for every campaign — because Google's Quality Score ties your ad costs to the pages your ads land on, so building those pages excellently is how I do my job, not a line item on your invoice.
$200 a month for hosting, starting month two. Your first month is ads only — I'd rather prove the ads work before you pay me to keep the site live.
No percentage of your ad spend, ever. Your ad budget goes to Google, entirely; my incentive is that it converts, not that it grows. And you own the site, the ad account, and the data — leave anytime, take everything.
I can publish these numbers because the service is deliberately narrow: one offering, one kind of client, one price. A flat fee is only frightening to publish when the plan is to charge different clients differently. Publishing the number is the easy half; why it's a flat fee rather than a percentage or a retainer is the part that shapes the work.
The honest caveats
Published pricing isn't a guarantee of quality — it's a guarantee of terms. A bad agency with public prices is still a bad agency; you've just been told the cost of finding out. What published pricing removes is the information asymmetry: you know the number before anyone has read your budget off your voice.
And the $1,500–$5,000 band isn't automatically a ripoff. Agencies carrying account managers, sales teams, and offices genuinely cost that much to run. The question worth asking is whether those layers make your phone ring — that's a longer conversation, and it's the next essay.
The test
You don't need to take any of this on faith, which is rather the point.
Before your next conversation with any veterinary marketing agency — mine included — send one email first: "What does it cost? Full number, everything included."
A confident operation answers in one reply, because the number is the number. If the answer is "it depends — let's hop on a quick call," you've learned what the call is for.
The same logic applied to SEO — why it is included rather than sold, and what that means for a retainer — is here.