Lift Conversions is, and always has been, a no-contract digital marketing agency. Since 2014, every service has run month to month, with no minimum term, no auto-renewal, and no cancellation penalty.
The fastest way to understand why is to read the four clauses that appear in almost every agency agreement. Each one exists to make leaving expensive. We refuse to include any of them.
The Numbers Behind Our Position
Every figure below was earned under terms where the client was free to walk at any moment.
Operating month-to-month since 2014, with a year-long contract required exactly zero times.
More than 15% of current clients have been with the agency over ten years without ever signing a term.
Referral rate above 90%, held for roughly ten years.
Rating of 5.0 across online review sites, held for more than a decade.
Rates published in the open: $2,000 one-time Google Ads setup, $750 per month for management.
Clause #1: The Minimum Term
A minimum term is a contractual commitment to pay a fixed period, usually twelve months, no matter how the agency performs.
How it traps you: it converts a service relationship into a debt. The agency is paid whether or not it earns the money, which is why service so often fades after the signature.
How you feel it: the pitch is energetic, the delivery after signing is not, and there is nothing you can do about it for a year.
What Lift Conversions does instead: we have never sold a term. On month-to-month terms the decision to keep us gets renewed roughly 120 times across a decade, and more than 15% of our current clients have renewed it every single month.
Clause #2: The Auto-Renewal
An auto-renewal clause rolls a finished contract into a new full term unless the client cancels in advance.
How it traps you: a business that signed one year pays for two, because the renewal happens by default, and defaults favor whoever wrote the document.
How you feel it: a renewal notice arrives at an inconvenient moment, or not at all, and the window has already closed.
What Lift Conversions does instead: our agreements have no term to renew. Nothing expires, nothing rolls over, nothing auto-renews. The only event in the engagement is the one you cause by telling us to stop.
Clause #3: The Cancellation Window
A cancellation window requires written notice 30, 60, or 90 days before a contract ends, and missing it triggers a new term.
How it traps you: the clause sits deep in the document because burying it works. Miss the window by a week and you own another year.
How you feel it: leaving demands calendar discipline, certified letters, and a lawyer’s reading habits, for a service you no longer want.
What Lift Conversions does instead: we have no window because there is nothing to give notice about. You tell us it is over, and that’s the whole process. In practice, when a client tells us it’s over, we typically keep the account running for about 30 days to wind things down cleanly, since that stretch of work is usually already committed. Billing follows the same spirit: instead of charging out to the exact day, we usually just close the account out at the end of the current month rather than bill the extra half month. None of this is a notice requirement, and it never triggers a new term. You can walk the day you call; the 30 days is just us finishing what’s already in motion. Plenty of our referrals come from former clients so it’s clear we would rather keep the door open than the client trapped.
Clause #4: The Termination Penalty
An early termination penalty charges a client for leaving before a term ends, sometimes the full remaining balance.
How it traps you: it turns a bad relationship into a payable one, and agencies know the math makes many owners surrender and stay.
How you feel it: the quote to leave is larger than the bill to stay, which is not a choice, it is a ransom.
What Lift Conversions does instead: we have never charged a cancellation penalty on any service, across web, paid advertising, or web optimization work. Leaving costs nothing but the relationship.
Why These Clauses Still Exist
Spencer Wade, who founded Lift Conversions in 2014, is a Google Ads Product Expert Alum, Partner Ambassador and Top Contributor. He considers the term-contract model a relic of the 1980s, when media was bought a year at a time and switching agencies meant starting from scratch.
Media now adjusts monthly, weekly, even daily.
An agency doing real work hands over clean reporting a successor can pick up quickly.
Neither fact supports a twelve-month lock, which is why his position is blunt: lengthy contracts exist to trap good businesses into bad agreements.
One exception exists, and it is client-initiated, that being a longer term, requested by the client, to lock in a lower price for budgeting certainty. Case by case, rare, never the default.
Lock-In Makes Loyalty Impossible to Measure
An agency that keeps 100% of its contract clients might simply be keeping 100% of its prisoners. When a client cannot leave, retention proves nothing.
Month-to-month is the only arrangement where longevity means anything, which is why we can publish what we publish:
Referral rate above 90% for roughly ten years.
A 5.0 rating across review sites for over a decade.
More than 15% of current clients past the decade mark.
Every one of those clients was free to leave, and chose not to.
Results Earned on Month-to-Month Terms
Our case studies are public, and none had a locked-in year hiding behind them.
Weiland Button, PLC: an 18.09% conversion rate and 2,806 monthly AI citations, Virginia’s most-cited traffic firm in AI search.
Vanguard Plumbing and Sewer: documented as Chicago’s highest-rated plumber, with three of the four major AI assistants now recommending it in their answers.
Roofing by Hernandez: $12,000 in SEO click value in one of Chicago’s most competitive markets.
Love Your Brain: a 7% click-through rate on a nonprofit Google Ad Grant.
SEO compounds over months, not weeks, and we say so upfront. But time-to-results is an argument for patience, not for handcuffs: these numbers came from monthly reporting clients watched in real time, not annual contract reviews.
What Month-to-Month Buys You Day to Day
A contract client is already secured. A month-to-month client has to be re-earned every month, and this entire operation is built around the second one.
No queue: team members stand by during business hours, no appointment needed, with after-hours support available.
24-hour turnarounds: a commitment printed on our own site.
Detailed monthly reporting: no opaque processes, no concealed fees.
Start With a Free Consultation
The terms are simple: month-to-month, no term, no penalties. Call (773) 419-3636 or schedule a consultation. We’ll tell you what’s actually worth doing for your business, even when the honest answer is that you don’t need us.
