A share of email-attributed revenue is the most common alternative to a flat retainer, and on paper it reads like the fairest deal in marketing: the agency only wins when you win. We charge a flat fee instead, and this post is the reasoning, written down so you can disagree with something specific.
What does "email-attributed revenue" actually count?
Klaviyo attributes an order to email when the buyer opened or clicked a message inside the attribution window before purchasing. That includes your best customer, who was buying this month anyway and happened to open Tuesday's campaign on the way. It includes the person who searched for you, clicked a transactional-looking send, and bought what was already in their head.
So a percentage deal is not a share of the revenue email created. It is a share of the revenue email touched, and those are different numbers — on most accounts, very different. The gap is largest exactly where a store is healthiest: a strong brand with loyal repeat buyers shows huge attributed revenue almost regardless of what the email partner does. We wrote about where that revenue really comes from in the flows-versus-campaigns split, and the short version is that the money concentrates in a handful of automations that run on their own once built.
Who does a revenue share actually align with?
Follow the incentive for a quarter. A partner paid on attributed revenue is paid to send more, to more people, with more discounts, because volume and discounting move the attributed number this month. List health, deliverability, and the unsubscribes that volume costs you land next quarter, on your side of the table. The misalignment is politest in month one and loudest in month six.
A flat fee has the opposite property. The only way to keep a flat-fee client is for the work to hold up — there is no attribution window doing the persuading.
So what do you pay for instead?
With us: a one-off build fee, then a flat monthly, and the real cost comparison against agencies, freelancers and hiring is public. The build is a machine you own — the flows, the templates, the rules, the files, on your accounts and your hardware. If we stop working together, it keeps running and it stays yours. No percentage, no lock-in past a notice period, no number on our invoice that grows because your brand got stronger.
That last clause is the whole argument. A store that doubles pays a revenue-share partner double for the same flows. Under a flat fee, growth is yours. We think that is what "aligned" should mean, and it is the model we would want if we were the ones buying.
