You are drowning. The daily ACH debit comes, every morning, like a tide that never goes out. A thousand dollars. Two thousand. And somebody calls you, a soft voice, and says: we can make it stop.
And you do not ask the price. Because the drowning man does not ask the price of the rope.
But ask. Ask now, before you sign. Because the price is the whole story. The price tells you everything, who they are, what they will do, and whether the rope is a rope or a noose.
The Honest Range
A legitimate MCA debt relief firm charges in one of three ways. Learn all three. Because the way they charge tells you more than the number.
- Percentage of enrolled debt. You owe $200,000 across your funders. The firm charges a percentage of that whole pile, usually somewhere between fifteen and thirty percent. So fifteen to sixty thousand dollars, depending. This is the most common structure in the industry.
- Percentage of savings. They settle your $200,000 down to $80,000. They saved you $120,000. Now they take a cut of that, often twenty-five to thirty-five percent. So thirty to forty-two thousand dollars on a settlement like that.
- Flat fee, or a retainer plus performance. A fixed monthly number. Or a modest upfront retainer married to a back-end cut tied to actual savings. The hybrid.
Now, here is the thing nobody whispers to you. The structure is not neutral. The structure is the incentive. And the incentive is the man's true face.
Watch Where The Incentive Points
A firm paid a flat percentage of your enrolled debt, paid whether they settle or not, has no fire in the belly. They are paid for enrolling you. The settlement is your problem. They collect either way. The file can sit. The file can rot. They are already paid.
A firm paid purely on contingency, purely on the settlement amount? Watch this one too. This man wants to settle fast and cheap, not to fight for the lowest number, but to close the file and bank the fee. Speed over depth.
The structure that points the firm's hunger in the same direction as yours, the senior advisor who gets paid when you get breathing room, paid out of the savings actually produced, that is the alignment you want. Not because it is kinder. Because the self-interest finally runs parallel to yours instead of against it.
You do not need a firm that loves you. You need a firm that profits only when you profit. Love is unreliable. Aligned greed is dependable.
The Fee That Is Not Allowed, And Yet It Is Everywhere
Hear this clearly, because here is where they steal from you.
The FTC says it plainly: a for-profit debt relief firm cannot charge you a fee before it has settled or reduced at least one debt. Not a retainer. Not an "enrollment fee." Not a "small administrative charge." Nothing. You pay when they deliver. This is not a guideline. It is the line.
And yet, walk through the industry and you will see the upfront fee everywhere, wearing a costume. "Enrollment fee." "Administrative charge." Ten, fifteen percent of your total debt, collected before a single funder has been called. You hand over $15,000 to a firm that has done nothing but mail one form letter.
Then comes the second theft, more clever. They tell you: stop paying your funders. Put the money in an escrow account instead. Trust the process.
This is the catastrophic instruction. In the MCA world, one missed payment is an Event of Default. The funder accelerates the whole balance. The UCC-1 lien drops. The notice goes to your customers. The Confession of Judgment, if you signed one, turns into a judgment overnight, no trial, no defense. While your money sits in their escrow account "building up," the buzzsaw is already running. And you walked into it on the advice of a salesman.
The Hidden Fees, The Ones Written So You Cannot Find Them
This is the cruelest part, so I will say it slowly.
Read deep into the contract. Past the warm page. Into the small print where they hide the teeth. You will find sentences like this one: if a creditor fails to respond to our efforts within 120 days, the debt is reclassified as "inactive," and a resolution fee of thirty-five percent of the enrolled balance is due.
Read it again. It means: even if they settle nothing, even if the funder never agrees to a single dollar of reduction, you still owe them thousands. They are paid for failure. They have written a contract where their failure is your bill.
And the "success fee," watch the arithmetic, because this is where the relief costs more than the disease.
You owe $100,000. They settle it for $60,000. They charge thirty-five percent of the "savings," thirty-five percent of the $40,000 they saved you, which is $14,000. So you pay the funder $60,000. You pay the firm $41,000, the success fee plus whatever else was buried. Your total: $101,000.
More than the original debt. You paid more to be "relieved" of it. And this does not count the lawsuit, the lien, the credit damage, the legal fees when the funder sues you anyway.
The relief was the trap. The trap wore the word "relief" so you would walk in smiling.
So What Should You Actually Pay?
A number, since you came for a number: fifteen to thirty percent of enrolled debt, or twenty-five to thirty-five percent of verified savings. Paid after results, not before. With no upfront fee, no "enrollment" costume, no escrow scheme, and no buried clause that bills you for failure.
But the number was never the real question. The real question is what the price reveals.
A fee charged before any work, that is a man taking your last money and offering nothing back. A guaranteed settlement percentage promised before anyone has read your contracts, "we settle every MCA at twenty cents," that is a lie, because the outcome depends on your legal defenses, your funders, your specific agreements, a hundred things no honest person can know in advance. A firm with no attorney, no bar number, no name to give you, that is a man bringing empty hands to a legal fight, because MCA debt is not simple debt. It is UCC liens and Confessions of Judgment and usury recharacterization and reconciliation failures. Without legal leverage there is no leverage at all, and a funder gives nothing to a firm that cannot hurt it.
The good firm tells you what you do not want to hear. The bad firm tells you everything is fixable, every case winnable, and then takes the retainer, and goes silent, and you discover six months later that none of it was true.
This is the alignment Delancey Street is built on: a business-debt-only firm, attorney-backed, paid out of the savings it actually produces, with no fee until a settlement exists. No upfront enrollment costume, no escrow scheme, no clause that bills you for failure. The first call is a diagnosis, not a commitment, and it costs nothing.
So when you ask "how much do they charge," you are really asking "who are these people." The fee is the confession. Read it before you sign. Not after.
After is where everyone reads it. After is too late.