What Can You Afford to Pay for One Enquiry?
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An agency quotes you a monthly fee and you have no way to tell whether it is dear or cheap. The number that settles it is your ceiling per enquiry: the most one enquiry can be worth to you before the marketing stops making you money. It takes five minutes and figures you already have.
Read every quote against that ceiling rather than against another agency's quote. Compare quotes with each other and you learn which agency is cheaper. Compare them with your ceiling and you learn whether either one is worth buying.
The arithmetic is not clever. The reason almost nobody does it is that two of the four inputs are uncomfortable to write down.
The one line of arithmetic
Your ceiling per enquiry is:
average order value × gross margin × close rate = the most one enquiry can be worth
Four inputs, in plain words:
- Average order value: what a customer pays you on a typical job, before GST. IRAS states that "the current GST rate in Singapore is 9%", so if you are registered, strip it out before you start. The tax was never yours.
- Gross margin: the share of that order left after the direct cost of delivering it. Materials, subcontractors, the hours of the person who does the work. Not rent, not your salary.
- Close rate: how many enquiries become jobs. If one in four becomes a job, that is 0.25.
- Repeat factor: how many times an average customer buys again. Leave it at 1 for your first pass, then come back to it, because it is usually the input that decides the answer.
Worked on a single order, with no repeats:
Current offer: SEO & GEO is now one package at S$750/month. Google Ads or Meta Ads with the SEO & GEO package: 10% of your ad budget. See all prices.
A S$1,000 order at a 35% margin is S$350 of gross profit. Close one enquiry in four and the average enquiry is worth S$87.50. Spend more than that per enquiry and you are buying revenue at a loss.
That S$87.50 is your ceiling, not your target. If you pay S$87.50 an enquiry you have handed the whole margin to the marketing, and nothing is left to pay rent or yourself. In our view, a sensible first pass is a third of the ceiling: pay up to about S$29 for an enquiry on that order, and you keep two-thirds of the margin.
Three Singapore examples, using real published prices
The prices below are ones we read on Singapore printing websites on 1 November 2026, in our study of ten printing pages. We name no business. Margins and close rates are assumptions, clearly marked, because no website publishes those.
| Job | Published price | At 35% margin | Close 1 in 4 | Ceiling per enquiry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One box of 100 name cards | S$33 | S$11.55 | ÷ 4 | S$2.89 |
| 100 A4 flyers | S$75 | S$26.25 | ÷ 4 | S$6.56 |
| 20,000 A4 flyers | S$1,930 | S$675.50 | ÷ 4 | S$168.88 |
Read the last two rows together first, because they are the same business selling from the same published price table.
No marketing channel on earth can deliver an enquiry for S$2.89. Not search, not ads, not us. If a printer's marketing is judged on name-card orders, the honest conclusion is that the marketing cannot pay for itself, and no agency should pretend otherwise.
The 20,000-flyer run carries a ceiling nearly sixty times the name-card ceiling in row one. Everything about whether marketing is worth buying sits in which of those jobs your enquiries actually bring.
This is why "what does SEO cost" is the wrong first question, and it is the one people type. In the 28 days to 1 November 2026, our own Search Console recorded 767 impressions for "seo pricing singapore", 520 for "seo price singapore" and 235 for "seo cost singapore", the last of those up 50% week on week. Hundreds of people a month are pricing this decision. The number they need first is their own.
Why the first order is usually the wrong number
Now put the repeat factor back, because it is where most service businesses actually live.
The name-card buyer who comes back twice a year for three years has bought six boxes, not one. At S$33 a box, that is S$198 of revenue and about S$69 of gross profit, and the ceiling per enquiry moves from S$2.89 to roughly S$17. Still thin, and now at least arguable.
Two honest cautions about that move. The first is that the repeat is a forecast, and forecasts flatter the person making them. Use what your invoices show, not what you hope. If you cannot pull repeat purchase history from your own books, your repeat factor is 1 until you can.
The second is that the repeat often has nothing to do with marketing. If customers come back because your production floor is reliable, the marketing bought the first order only, and crediting it with six is how businesses end up over-spending for two years.
How to read a quote against your ceiling
Take any monthly fee and divide it by the enquiries it would have to produce.
Our own SEO, AEO and GEO programme is S$750/month with 20 articles a month. Run that against the ceiling, and the arithmetic is simple:
- At 10 enquiries a month, it costs S$75 an enquiry.
- At 5 enquiries a month, S$150.
- At 3 enquiries a month, S$250.
- At 1 enquiry a month, S$750.
Those are not forecasts, and we are not promising any of them. They are the break-even counts: the number of enquiries that would have to arrive for the spend to sit under your ceiling. Put your own ceiling beside that list and you can see, before you sign anything, how many enquiries the arrangement has to produce to make sense. A business with a S$170 ceiling needs about 5 a month. A business with a S$17 ceiling needs about 45, and should probably not buy.
Do the same with every quote you hold. A S$3,000 retainer is not three times worse than a S$1,000 one, and it is not better either. It is a different number of enquiries, and only your ceiling says which fits.
When the arithmetic says do not buy
Three cases where we would tell an owner to keep the money, and we have published the longer version of each:
- Your order value is too small and nobody repeats. Low ticket plus one-off purchase is the one combination that defeats every paid channel. Fix the offer or the repeat before the marketing.
- Your buyers do not search. If the next ten customers come from a referral, a tender list or a relationship built over nine years, search spend buys you traffic and not revenue. Our note on thin markets with big orders sets out how to tell.
- You cannot count enquiries at all. If you do not know how many enquiries you received last month or where they came from, every number above is guesswork. That is the first job, and it is cheaper than any retainer. We wrote about the measurement side in paying for SEO but getting no enquiries.
The uncomfortable version, for us: a business whose ceiling is S$17 an enquiry is a business we should decline. We would rather say that at the first meeting than take three months of fees and explain the chart afterwards.
What this calculation cannot tell you
It is a budget ceiling, not a prediction, and four things sit outside it.
It cannot tell you how long the spend takes to produce anything, which for content-led search work is months rather than weeks. It cannot tell you enquiry quality, and a channel that brings cheap enquiries you cannot convert has a close rate of its own that you will only learn by running it. It cannot allocate credit between channels when a buyer sees your Google listing, asks an assistant, and then phones a friend. And it cannot price what a competitor's absence from a search is worth to you next year.
So treat the ceiling as the line you should not cross, and treat everything above the line as a judgement you still have to make. If you want the staffing comparison instead, we worked that one out in in-house marketer or agency, and the output-per-month question in whether 20 articles a month is right.
What I would do this week
Three steps, in this order, and none of them needs an agency.
- Pull your last 20 invoices and work out the average, before GST. Not your best job. The middle of the pile.
- Write down your gross margin on those jobs honestly, materials and labour out, and your close rate from the last two months of enquiries. If you have to guess the close rate, guess low.
- Multiply, divide by three, and write the number on a sticky note. That is the figure to hold next to every marketing quote you receive this year, including ours.
One next step
If you want help getting the enquiry count right first, that is the free part. Send us the figures you have and we will tell you whether search is even the right purchase for your margin, and say so plainly if it is not. Start through our contact page.
The GST rate quoted is from IRAS's current GST rates page, read on 1 November 2026. Published printing prices are from ten Singapore printing pages we read the same day; no business is named. Margins, close rates and repeat rates in the examples are assumptions, not measurements. This is marketing guidance, not tax or financial advice.
FAQ
What is a good cost per enquiry in Singapore?
There is no market figure, because it depends entirely on your order value, margin and close rate. Work out your own ceiling: average order value before GST, times gross margin, times close rate. Then aim to pay about a third of it, so the margin is not fully spent on marketing.
Should I use revenue or profit in the calculation?
Gross profit. Revenue flatters every channel, because the cost of delivering the job comes out of it before you see a cent. Use the margin left after materials, subcontractors and the labour hours that the job consumes, and leave rent and your own salary out of this particular sum.
How do I find my close rate if I do not track enquiries?
Count backwards from your invoices. Take last month's jobs, then count the enquiries you can still find in your phone, inbox and WhatsApp. It will be an undercount of enquiries, so your close rate will read high. Treat the first figure as provisional and start counting properly this month.
Does a higher monthly fee mean a better agency?
No, and neither does a lower one. A fee is only a number of enquiries in disguise: divide it by the enquiries it must produce and compare that against your ceiling. Two quotes can be equally reasonable for two businesses with different order values.
What if my ceiling says marketing is not worth buying?
Then do not buy it yet. Raise the order value, add a repeat purchase, or find the segment of your work with the better margin, and run the sum again. A business with a S$17 ceiling has a pricing and offer problem, and no amount of search visibility will fix that.