The two numbers that matter
Your cost per link is set by your partner plan: £400 on the 5-link plan, £350 on the 10-link plan, £325 on the 20-link plan. Your resale price is set by you, and we publish recommended retail guidance to anchor it: £700 per link on 5 links a month, £550 on 10, £500 on 20, usually wrapped inside a wider retainer rather than quoted as a line item.
The agency margin is simply those two numbers multiplied out. Every link behind them is earned the same way, through outreach that places your client inside articles on real publications and news sites. If your market supports pricing above recommended retail, the margin improves; if you sell links inside a heavily discounted retainer, it shrinks. Run your own figures before treating any scenario below as yours.
Worked example: the 10-link plan
Take the Established plan at £3,499 a month for 10 links. Resell those placements at the recommended retail of £550 each and you bill £5,500: a gross margin of £2,001 a month, or about 36 percent. At £600 per link the margin is £2,501, about 42 percent. At £700 it is £3,501, roughly 50 percent.
Spread across, say, three clients, that is a fulfilment line producing around £2,000 a month in gross margin for the cost of writing briefs and forwarding reports. The same arithmetic holds across the range: Boutique at its £3,500 recommended retail is £1,500 of margin on a £2,000 cost, about 43 percent, and Portfolio at its £10,000 recommended retail is £3,501 on a £6,499 cost, about 35 percent.
The honest version of the comparison with hiring
The alternative to reselling is building outreach in-house: a dedicated hire, the media databases and verification tools they need, and the months of ramp before placements flow reliably. For most small and mid-sized agencies that overhead lands before the first link does, and it recurs whether or not clients are buying that month.
Reselling flips the cost structure from fixed to variable. You pay partner rates only for volume you have already sold, and stepping down a plan takes 30 days notice rather than a redundancy process. The trade-off is real too: you give up some margin versus a fully loaded in-house team running at capacity. Agencies with enough consistent volume to keep an outreach team busy year-round can beat partner pricing; most agencies are not there, which is why the reseller model exists.
What the margin has to cover
An agency margin is not profit until it has covered your time, so price your resale with that time in mind. The recurring work on your side is writing the initial brief, sanity-checking the monthly report and handling the client conversation, which partners tell us settles at an hour or two per client per month once campaigns are running.
Build that time into your resale price rather than treating it as free, and resist pricing below the recommended retail just to win a deal. A client paying £450 per link is rarely more loyal than one paying £550; they are simply £100 per link cheaper to lose. The reseller programme page covers how the wider commercial protections work.