No. There are no upfront costs at all: no setup fee, no onboarding charge, and no monthly retainer. With locksmith advertising on our pay-per-customer model, you pay 10% per qualified customer only after genuine enquiries reach your business — pay per qualified customer means the risk sits with us, not you.
Every line item, spelled out
Let's go through the invoice line by line, because "no upfront costs" should mean exactly that. Setup: $0. We build your tracking, audit your visibility and configure your campaigns on our own time. Monthly retainer: $0 — there is no standing charge for our work, ever. Onboarding fee: $0. Reporting fee: $0, and you get full access to the same dashboards we use. Contract: none, so there is no cancellation penalty hiding in the small print either. The only money that ever changes hands is 10% per qualified customer we deliver, with "qualified" defined with you in writing before we start. Your free Google Business Profile — the highest-ROI asset most locksmiths underuse — reflects the philosophy: we optimize what you already own before spending a cent. If you haven't claimed yours yet, Google's Business Profile help center walks through the setup.
The one cost that isn't ours: Google Ads spend
Honesty requires one clarification. If we run Google Ads for you, the ad spend itself goes directly to Google from your own ad account — never through us, never marked up. This is deliberate and it protects you three ways: you own the account and its entire history, every dollar of spend is visible to you in Google Ads itself, and you can pause spending any time without asking our permission. Our compensation stays exactly what it always is: 10% per qualified customer the campaigns produce. We never take a percentage of ad spend, because that would reward us for spending more of your money — the opposite of alignment.
Why traditional agencies charge upfront — and why we don't
Upfront fees aren't a scam; they're how traditional agencies de-risk themselves. A setup fee covers onboarding labor, and a retainer guarantees revenue whether or not customers arrive. It's a reasonable business model — for the agency. But it misaligns incentives: once the retainer is paid, the urgency to produce customers drops. We flipped the model around. By taking $0 upfront, we accept the risk that our work might not pay off — which is exactly why we work so hard to make sure it does. It's also why 20+ locksmith companies work with us on this basis: the only agencies that can afford to charge after results are the ones confident of producing them.
What happens before your first payment
Here's the sequence, so you know what "customers first" looks like in practice. First, we audit your current visibility — profile, site, reviews, competitors — and provision tracked phone numbers for every channel. Then we rebuild your Business Profile, launch or rebuild campaigns, and agree the qualified-customer definition with you in writing. Then the enquiries start arriving. You listen to the recordings, confirm they're genuine, and only then does billing begin — 10% per qualified customer, invoiced on evidence you can verify yourself. If the first month produces nothing, you pay nothing. That's not a promotion. That's the model.
Key takeaways
- Setup, retainer, onboarding, reporting, contract: all $0.
- The only payment is 10% per qualified customer, after delivery.
- Google Ads spend goes directly to Google from your account — never marked up.
- Zero upfront cost is possible because the risk sits with us, not you.
Related reading
If marketing with zero upfront cost sounds too good to be true, that's exactly why we put the qualified-customer definition in writing before we start — no ambiguity, no surprises. Locksmith Advertising earns only when you get customers: 10% per qualified customer, $0 upfront, cancel anytime. Message us on WhatsApp and we'll walk through exactly how it would work for your business and your service area.