11/05/2026
Indeed costs £7,500 a month if you've got ten live roles on it.
I've not met a single agency owner this year who's actually sat down and worked that out properly.
Here's the maths, and why it matters more than most people realise.
Since 1 July 2025, Indeed has enforced a £ 25-a-day minimum sponsored spend per job, killed campaign pooling so every role needs its own budget, and started phasing out the single-source XML feeds that agencies have relied on for 15 years to syndicate jobs automatically.
Ten live perm roles, sponsored at the minimum, equals £250 a day. Multiply by thirty days, and you have £7,500 a month going to a platform that built its audience on the back of free agency XML feeds, and is now pivoting to a direct-to-employer model that disintermediates the very agencies that fed it for the last decade and a half.
A typical UK SME recruitment agency, ten staff, perm desk, eight placements a month at an average fee of nine grand, generates about £72,000 of NFI a month. Indeed, at the new minimum, it eats roughly ten per cent of that, before LinkedIn Recruiter, before CV-Library, before Reed, before any of the other channel rent.
The agency website itself, the asset you actually own, generates about three applications per role compared to twenty-five via the boards.
Not because the website is bad. Because the website is invisible to Google for Jobs, widget candidates actually click on the search results page these days, and the schema needed to appear there is missing from most agency websites.
That is not a marketing problem. That is structural.
Worth thinking about.
