Ask a small business owner what they think of their agency, and you’ll usually get a shrug, not outrage.
The work is fine; people are professional. The strategy decks look sharp. What wears the relationship down is the shape of the deal itself: a fixed sum, paid every month, for output that has no obligation to match how busy or quiet that month was. You pay the same in a slow July as you do in a frantic December, whether the business needs four posts or forty.
It’s a pricing model built for an era before marketing could move at the speed a small business actually does. The business pays for the team’s capacity, while what it actually needs is execution that can change with demand.
And for the first time, there’s a real alternative to that model: an AI-powered growth platform that can handle recurring marketing work on the business’s schedule rather than the agency’s.
The Retainer Wasn’t Built for How Small Businesses Move
To be fair to agencies, what you’re paying for isn’t nothing.
A good one brings a strategist who’s seen a hundred businesses like yours, a designer who can make your brand look considered, a monthly report that gestures at accountability.
However, it’s priced and paced for a client whose marketing needs are large and steady enough to be worth planning a quarter.
Put a number on it: a typical retainer runs close to ₹40,000 a month for 12 posts, a few campaigns, and account management. That number doesn’t change in a quiet month. However, in a month when the business needs twice the output, it often costs more on top. SOLO’s plans start at ₹2,000, priced to move with the business’s needs instead of a number that’s fixed months in advance.
The real needs of small businesses are smaller, faster, and more erratic than a retainer was ever built to flex around. A slow week doesn’t mean you need less marketing; it might mean you finally have time to run the campaign you’ve been postponing.
A sudden spike in DMs doesn’t wait politely for the agency’s next status call. The mismatch here is tempo – a cost problem and a speed problem, both coming from the same fixed shape of the deal.
Enter SOLO: An AI-Powered Growth Platform Built for That Tempo
This is the point where AI marketing tools enter the conversation – not as a replacement for expertise, but as an answer to tempo.
SOLO, Interakt’s AI-powered growth platform, doesn’t work off a monthly plan. It plans content, launches ads, and replies to customers continuously, adjusting to whatever the week looks like rather than what was forecast a month earlier.
There’s no waiting for the next call to find out something’s live, because there was never a call scheduled to begin with.
That’s the whole argument, compressed into one operational detail: agencies plan around the calendar. SOLO plans around the business.
Traditional agency model | SOLO |
Fixed monthly retainer | AI team working continuously |
Work planned around meetings and briefs | Work planned around what the business needs |
Content delivered on a set schedule | Content created and published continuously |
Customer responses depend on the support model | Customer conversations handled as they come in |
More work often means expanding the scope | Execution can flex with the business |
You pay for the team’s capacity | You pay for marketing work getting done |
Tara and Ved: The Team Behind SOLO
SOLO isn’t a single tool running on autopilot. It’s two AI teammates carrying two different halves of the work.
Tara
Tara does what a content team and an ads specialist together would normally handle:
- Planning a month of content in advance
- Creating the actual posts, reels, and captions
- Running Meta Ads without a brief needing to be written first
- And takes it all live once approved
Ved
Ved does what account support rarely covers in a retainer:
- Replying to customers the moment they write in
- Staying on every lead until it closes
Where Agencies Still Matter
None of this makes agencies obsolete.
A rebrand, a multi-market launch, anything that genuinely needs strategic judgment from a room of experienced people is still agency territory. But a retainer isn’t designed to pay month to month for that.
Most retainers pay for consistency:
- A steady drumbeat of posts
- Ads that don’t go stale
- Someone answering when a customer writes in
That’s the work for which you don’t need a strategist. It needs to happen, reliably, every single day, an altogether different problem than the agency retainer was built to solve. It’s also, increasingly, the work SOLO was built to run.
Why SOLO
SOLO is built by Interakt, backed by Jio Haptik’s thirteen years in conversational and voice AI.
It runs on a platform recognized by Meta as the Small Business Champion for three consecutive years for onboarding more SMBs than any other partner.
It currently supports over 50,000 businesses worldwide, proof that the infrastructure underneath it isn’t experimental.
Getting Started
If there’s one thing worth testing before you cancel anything, it’s this: run SOLO for a single billing cycle alongside your current retainer, and compare what actually came out of each.
Most businesses that make this comparison don’t come back with a nuanced verdict. They come back having already decided.
