Concierge rate estimator: the monthly cost band by engagement model

The estimator does one thing: it takes the published rate band for an engagement model and multiplies it out to a month at the volume entered. Four models are covered, because four is what the guidance behind this page publishes: paying per request at $50 to $300+, an hourly rate at $75 to $250+, a monthly retainer at $1,000 to $5,000+, and an annual membership at $5,000 to $100,000+. Each band is quoted per unit, and the unit differs, which is the whole reason a tool is useful here.

A request, an hour, a month and a year cannot be compared until they are put on the same footing.

That footing is the calendar month. For the per-request and hourly models the band is multiplied by the volume entered. For the retainer nothing is multiplied, because the published figure is already monthly and does not move with volume. For the annual membership the band is divided by twelve. There is no weighting, no adjustment for city or firm, and no hidden factor; every line shown beside a result can be reproduced on paper in under a minute, and the page is arranged so that a reader who distrusts it can do exactly that.

The result is a band, never a single number. A single number would imply a precision the sources do not have, and would be read as a quote. The band is instead the range that published guidance implies at that volume, which is a different and more honest claim. Where the guidance describes a range as open at the top, the upper figure is shown with a plus sign rather than being closed off with a ceiling that nobody published.

The width of the band is information in itself. A per-request arrangement at eight requests a month runs from $400 to $2,400+, a spread of six times between the floor and the published ceiling. That is not looseness in the estimator; it reflects how differently a request can be priced depending on what it asks for. A restaurant table and a berth during a race week are both one request, and the guidance prices them at opposite ends of the same band. The scope control exists to acknowledge this. Choosing routine keeps the lower half of the band, choosing complex keeps the upper half, and mixed keeps the whole of it. The midpoint on which the band splits is the average of the two published ends, and the control adds no figure the source does not carry.

The retainer band behaves differently from the others, and this is the thing most worth noticing. It does not change when volume changes. At two requests a month it reads $1,000 to $5,000+, and at thirty it reads the same. A retainer is a purchase of capacity rather than of output, and the estimator shows that plainly by refusing to scale it. Whether that is good value depends entirely on how much of the capacity gets used, which is the question the crossover section answers.

The hourly model is the one place the estimator asks for a different unit. The volume control counts billed hours for that model rather than requests, because the guidance publishes no conversion between the two and any figure supplied here would be invented. The one hourly example it does give is a family billed $5,000 for fifty hours over six months, which works out at $100 an hour and a little over eight hours a month. That sits toward the lower end of the $75 to $250+ hourly band and is a reasonable anchor for a household with steady, modest needs.

The most useful output on this page is the volume at which paying per request stops being cheaper than a monthly retainer. Comparing like ends of the two bands, the retainer floor of $1,000 divided by the per-request floor of $50 gives 20 requests, and the retainer ceiling of $5,000 divided by the per-request ceiling of $300 gives 16.7. So on the published figures the crossover sits between 16.7 and 20 requests a month. Below that a retainer is paying for capacity that goes unused; above it the retainer is the cheaper form, and increasingly so, because its cost is flat while the per-request bill keeps climbing.

The outer readings are worth knowing too, because they show how far apart the extremes are. The cheapest retainer against the dearest request crosses at 3.3 requests, and the dearest retainer against the cheapest request crosses at 100. Anyone whose requests are all at the $300 end should therefore be looking at a retainer from about four a month; anyone whose requests are all simple will not reach the point where a top-band retainer pays until volume is very high indeed. The like-for-like figure is the sensible planning number, but the spread explains why two people at the same volume can reasonably reach opposite conclusions.

Per-request figures are $50 and $300 multiplied by the volume in the first column. Retainer figures are the published monthly band and do not change with volume.

For a reader without scripting, or one who simply wants the whole picture at once, the table below multiplies each model out at the default volume of 8 requests a month across the whole published band. The arithmetic column is the same line the estimator prints beside its result, so a figure in the table and a figure from the control panel can be checked against each other.

All four bands: Approved Experiences, A Guide To Concierge Service Pricing And Costs, accessed 2026-09-03. For the hourly row the volume counts billed hours.

The bands above come from a single pricing guide, and a reader should know what that guide is and is not. It describes the market as a whole rather than any one firm, it gives ranges rather than tariffs, and it does not say how many firms sit at each end. A separate comparison of membership programmes, published byThe Discerned Few, reports segment figures that sit alongside it: entry lifestyle programmes at €1,000 to €6,000 a year, dedicated-manager tiers at €15,000 to €45,000+, and app-led platforms at $2,500 to $3,000. Those are in different currencies and are not folded into the estimator, but they are consistent with the annual membership band it uses.

What no published source gives is the volume a particular household will actually generate, and that is the variable that decides everything. The estimator cannot supply it. The honest way to use this page is to count the requests of the last three months, place them on the scope scale with some severity, and read the crossover against that number. A retainer bought for a volume that never materialises is the most common expensive mistake in this category, and the arithmetic for avoiding it is all on this page.

The worked examples in the same guide are a useful sanity check on the output. A startup founder on a retainer at $2,500 a month sits inside the $1,000 to $5,000+ band; an executive on an annual membership at $30,000 a year sits inside the $5,000 to $100,000+ band and works out at $2,500 a month. Neither is a quote either, but both show that the bands describe real arrangements rather than theoretical ones.