We Published Our Entire Rate Card. Here Is Why Nobody Else Does.
By Daniel Bryant · 18 August 2026
The Short Version
Recruitment pricing is almost never published because the price is set per conversation, based on what the provider believes the buyer will pay. Publishing a rate card removes that flexibility permanently. We published ours anyway — a fixed monthly fee for a defined amount of recruiting capacity, with the salary bands, fair-use limits and the situations where the model is the wrong answer all on the same page. This post explains the reasoning and what it forced us to fix.
Go and Look
Pick five recruitment providers in your market. Try to find out what any of them charge without giving someone your email address.
You will not manage it. You will find “competitive fee structures”, “flexible commercial models”, “pricing tailored to your requirements”, and a form.
That is not laziness. It is deliberate, it is close to universal, and it works — which is precisely why it deserves examining.
What Quoting by Conversation Optimises For
When the price is set on a call, it is set using information gathered on that call. How well funded you are. How urgent the role is. Whether you have used agencies before. Whether you flinched at the first number.
None of that describes the work. All of it describes your willingness to pay.
The result is a market where two companies buy an identical service in the same month at materially different prices, and neither finds out. Not fraud — standard commercial practice, taught as good negotiation. But it means the number attached to a piece of recruitment work is largely disconnected from the work itself.
There is a second effect, less obvious and more corrosive. When price is negotiated per deal, the skill that gets rewarded inside a recruitment business is negotiation, not recruiting. The people who rise are the ones who hold rate. Over time, that shapes what the business is actually good at.
What Publishing Costs You
I want to be straight about this, because “we publish our prices because we are honest” is a smug argument and an incomplete one.
Publishing a rate card costs real commercial optionality:
You cannot price-discriminate. The well-funded Series C pays what the bootstrapped company pays. On any single deal, that is money left behind.
You lose the anchoring game. In a negotiated sale you control when the number appears and what surrounds it. Published, it arrives naked, before any context, and gets compared with things it is not comparable to.
Competitors get a free target. Anyone can undercut a number they can see. They do not have to be better, only cheaper on the page.
The number has to survive scrutiny you are not present for. A CFO reads it at 9pm with no one to explain it. Every figure has to hold up alone.
That last one is the reason to do it, because it forces something specific.
What It Forced Us to Fix
To publish a number, the number has to be defensible. Which meant we had to work out what the service actually costs to deliver, rather than what a given buyer might tolerate.
That exercise changed things:
Roles had to be banded properly. A Sales Engineer search is not the same amount of work as an SDR search, so pretending one price covers both is either overcharging on one or losing money on the other. Three bands by base salary, each consuming a different amount of monthly capacity.
Capacity had to have honest limits. Unlimited anything is a lie in a service delivered by a person. So the fair-use limits are published too: how many roles can run at once, how much unused capacity rolls over, how far you can burst in a busy month.
Hiring freezes needed a written answer. Freezes happen, and “we’ll look after you” is not a policy. Rollover and expiry can be extended by written agreement where the delay is genuine and has an end date.
We had to name where we are the wrong choice. Under about six hires a year, a contingency agency is cheaper and you should use one. Over about twenty sustained, build an internal team. That is on the pricing page, in a section with a heading, not buried in an FAQ.
None of that existed before pricing had to be written down. That is the actual argument for publishing: not that it is virtuous, but that it makes you finish the thinking.
The Rate Card
Fractional talent acquisition. Monthly capacity, not a fee per hire. Software included rather than licensed on top.
Roles are banded by base salary, each consuming a set number of monthly credits. A role consumes its credits every month it stays open, and balances are assessed on the 1st against live roles — so a role filled on the 8th frees that credit for the rest of the month.
Three tiers, from $5,000 a month. The bands, the credit costs, the fair-use limits, the minimum term and the notice period are all on the fractional talent acquisition page, along with a calculator that takes the roles you expect to hire and tells you which tier fits — including telling you not to buy, if the volume is too low to justify it.
US pricing is published separately, in US dollars against US salary bands, on the US page. It is not a currency conversion of the Australian rate card. The two markets have different salary levels and different agency norms, and converting one into the other would have produced a number that made sense in neither.
The Part That Matters
You should not choose a recruitment provider because their pricing is public. Published pricing tells you nothing about whether they can recruit.
What it does tell you is that they have decided what they are worth in advance, in writing, for everyone. Whether that is a signal you value is up to you.
But next time you sit through a discovery call that produces no number, it is worth asking what the extra conversation is actually for. Sometimes it is genuine scoping. Often it is calibration — and the thing being calibrated is you.
The full rate card, the salary bands, the fair-use limits and the honest section on when this is the wrong service are all on the fractional talent acquisition page. No form.