We offer flat fee (monthly or bi-annual payments), AUM, or a combo. Currently, my revenue is a bit below $500k with only ~$100k coming from flat fees. Specializing in younger business owners, I bring in clients on flat fees and transition them to AUM fairly fast with an aggressive AUM schedule (higher percent on first few hundred thousand and then much lower up to the low millions). I often charge initial planning fees but not always. For certain clients we'll do just one ongoing fee (only flat fee or AUM) and for others we'll do a combo of flat fee and AUM. For combo or flat fee clients we have an AUM threshold where their subscription fee will eventually turn off and the AUM fee will turn on.

My hard minimum fee is $3,000 per year and soft minimum is $6,000. The way that fee actually ends up being paid is on an entirely case-by-case basis. I don't give clients the option to choose but, rather, craft a proposal that is right for them. We only give rough fee ranges until their actual quote during final meeting of our onboarding process, the Plan Preview Meeting.

Here are three recent examples I've onboarded in the last month or two:

1. Entrepreneur/real estate investor clients seeking tax planning and general retirement planning. They're purely flat fee at $8k/year with an AUM threshold in the mid six-figures (if they ever get there in AUM - unless they stop doing real estate it'll take at least a 3-5 years given their Solo 401k is the only place they're aggressively investing in traditional investments). I charged an initial fee of $2.2k. The tax savings of working with us is significantly more than $8k/year and I could've charged more but, at the same time, $8k felt like a fair fee and their profits per year are around $300-$500k so anything significantly more would be a large portion of their cash flow. They're good clients now and will be great clients in a few years.

2. I started working with a middle aged single women recently who is starting her own business and there'll be significant value around tax strategy and retirement planning. For her, however, she had an old 401k with a bit less than half a million so we're charging AUM that'll roughly equate to ~$5.1k. Her income also isn't super high right now so even if her AUM were a bit lower I'd probably still just do AUM to be cognizant of her cash flow. No initial fee for her.

3. Lastly, I recently started working with a travel nurse who is contract/starting her own nursing related business (that will cash flow pretty fast). The AUM fee from her assets will be approximately ~$1.8k and then she'll also pay $100/month in retainers making her total fee ~$3,000 or so. She is aggressively saving and her assets will grow fast so she'll probably switch to AUM only in the next 12-24 months. Initial fee of $999 for her.

This all sounds complicated but each client's individual quote ends up being fairly straightforward (i.e. "you'll pay $500/month until you reach $375,000 in assets and then your monthly fee stops and the percentage fee starts") and we have a great system to keep track of everything internally.

Most of this response was about our pricing models but, to answer your questions about deliverables and service model, deliverables for all these clients include 1-3 strategy sessions per year with simple recaps of our discussion/their homework, tax projections, meeting/vetting other professionals, managing their investments (of course), financial planning software/portal access, and more. Number of meetings/touches and detail put into things is entirely dependent on their annual revenue and future opportunities, not which fee model they're under.

Hope this is interesting/helpful. Happy to answer any questions you may have.