The price of entry: 82% of US agencies that disclose a minimum will start at $10,000 or less
Correction, November 7, 2026. Recomputed on the 1,441 listings with a Clutch-published minimum: 81.5% start at $10,000 or less, $5,000 is the most common minimum (31.8%), and 6.6% require $50,000 or more. The headline figure was 82%.
Minimum project sizes across 1,648 disclosing US growth vendors show an accessible market floor: $5,000 is the most common gate, and six-figure minimums are rare.
1,648 listings in The Wall's index publish a minimum project size. The most common gate is $5,000, and the overwhelming majority of the market opens below the level many mid-market buyers assume:
| Minimum project size | Firms | Share of disclosed |
|---|---|---|
| $1,000+ | 461 | 28.0% |
| $5,000+ | 534 | 32.4% |
| $10,000+ | 365 | 22.1% |
| $25,000+ | 182 | 11.0% |
| $50,000+ | 66 | 4.0% |
| $75,000+ | 22 | 1.3% |
| $100,000+ | 14 | 0.8% |
| $250,000+ | 4 | 0.2% |
1,360 of 1,648 disclosing firms (82.5%) will open an engagement at $10,000 or less. Only 106 firms (6.4%) set the gate at $50,000 or above, and just four firms in the entire index require a quarter-million dollars to start.
Reading a minimum correctly
A minimum project size is a qualification filter, not a price list. Firms use it to screen out engagements too small to staff properly. For a buyer at $5M+ in revenue, the data says the filter is rarely the obstacle: the market's entry gates cluster far below a serious quarter's marketing budget. The more useful signal is the combination: a firm's minimum, its hourly band, and its team size together sketch what a real first engagement looks like before the first call.
90 firms in the engagement-data set (5.2%) publish no minimum at all.
How this was computed. Figures are computed from The Wall's index of approved, US-based, machine-verified-live listings, using the index snapshot current when each briefing was published: 2,286 listings at launch (August 3, 2026) and 3,460 in the latest snapshot (captured August 9, 2026). Engagement data (rates, minimum project sizes, team sizes, founding years, ratings) are provider-declared figures published on public Clutch profiles; they were present for 1,517 of the 2,286 launch listings (corrected November 7, 2026: earlier versions counted 221 records whose figures did not come from Clutch, and briefings that used them carry correction notes), and coverage counts for later snapshots are stated inside each briefing that uses them. Percentages of "disclosed" values exclude listings that publish no figure. Nothing in this briefing is estimated or modeled. Sourcing standards: editorial policy.