I fired my agency and rebuilt everything myself in less time than it took them to answer my emails.
That's not a complaint. That's data.
I had hired a team for marketing and website development at SOM Aesthetics. They weren't bad. They were just slow. Agency-slow, which means every decision went through three people, every revision took a week, and every week I was on a call explaining what I wanted instead of seeing it built. I was the intervention required to move anything forward.
That's the thing nobody tells you about agency retainers. The invoice is the small cost. The real cost is founder time.
The Math Nobody Does
Track your hours for two weeks. Not the agency's hours. Yours. Every email you write clarifying a brief. Every Loom you record explaining what you meant. Every revision cycle where you're essentially doing the creative direction anyway.
For me, it was north of five hours a week. I was the intervention required to move anything. The agency felt like it was handling things. It was actually borrowing my attention in small increments and paying me back in updates about what they were going to do next month.
I let them go. Then I put that money into tools and rebuilt.
What I Actually Built With
For copywriting: Claude. I've fed it enough context about SOM Aesthetics that it understands the tone. It's not perfect on the first pass. Nothing is. But it's close enough to edit, and I can edit close the same day I ask for it. I cannot edit a blank page delivered three weeks late.
For UI and site builds: v0.dev for generating components, Cursor for working through the code, Framer for publishing. Brief to live without a ticket queue. That's the stack.
For anything requiring a human: I brought in one developer who works the way I work. Fast, direct, clear on deliverables. One person who ships beats four people who coordinate.
The agency wasn't failing. It was working exactly the way agencies work. I was just no longer willing to pay for that pace with my time.
How to Know If Your Agency Is Actually Saving You Time
Ask yourself one question: if they disappeared tomorrow, would your week get harder or easier?
If the honest answer is easier, that's your answer.
The signs are specific. You're on more calls about the work than you're seeing finished work. You've rewritten their copy more than once. You know the project status better than they do because you're the one holding it together. You're writing briefs so detailed they could just as easily be instructions to an AI.
That last one is the tell. If you're writing briefs that specific, you have already done the creative work. You're paying someone to execute it slowly.
This Isn't About AI Being Better
I want to be precise here because this gets misread. This isn't about AI replacing agencies or developers becoming obsolete. I still work with humans. I just changed what I'm paying humans to do.
Humans are for judgment calls, relationship work, and the things that require someone to care about the outcome. AI is for execution speed, iteration volume, and getting something in front of me today so I can make decisions today.
Three Things to Do This Week
First, audit the relationship. Track your actual hours managing your agency for two weeks. Honest hours. Three hours a week or more and they are not saving you time.
Second, test the alternative. Take one piece of work, one landing page or one email sequence, and rebuild it yourself using Claude for copy and v0.dev or Framer for the build. See how long it actually takes versus your current timeline for the same scope.
Third, change the contract terms when you hire next. Put deliverable cadence in writing. Not meeting cadence. Not update cadence. Shipped work cadence, weekly. If they won't agree to that, you already know what you're buying.
I don't regret hiring the agency. I needed to see what slow looked like before I could build something faster. That was worth something. But I'm not going back.