This is general information, not legal advice, and it is not exhaustive. Contract law differs by country and by state, and a clause that is unenforceable in one place is binding in another. If real money is involved, pay a lawyer for an hour of their time — it is the cheapest part of the whole transaction.
Nobody signs a bad agency contract because they were careless. They sign it because it arrives after a friendly call, at a moment when the offer feels like the first bit of luck they have had, and because the clauses that matter are dull, near the back, and written to be skimmed.
A useful agency exists. Plenty of creators are better off with one, and a percentage in exchange for genuine work is a normal commercial arrangement. The problem is that the same contract template circulates across hundreds of agencies, and it is drafted to protect the agency in every place where the two of you might later disagree.
So read it in the order below rather than front to back. The exit is the part that tells you what everything else is worth.
On this page
Read the exit clause first
Open the document, scroll to termination, and read that before anything else. Every condition that makes an exit painful is visible in the contract before you sign it — which means every painful exit was, technically, agreed to in advance.
You are looking for four numbers: how long the term runs, how much notice you must give, what leaving costs, and whether anything survives the end of the agreement. If any of the four is missing, that is not an oversight. A contract with a vague termination clause is a contract where the agency intends to decide the terms later.
The money clauses
1. What the percentage is a percentage of
The number everyone argues about is the least important part. What matters is the base it applies to. A commission on gross revenue is charged before platform fees; a commission on net is charged after. On OnlyFans, where the platform keeps 20%, that distinction moves the real rate by a fifth on its own.
Then check what counts as revenue. Subscriptions, obviously. But tips, pay-per-view messages, customs, live-stream tips, referral earnings from the platform's own scheme, merchandise, brand deals you found yourself, and income from platforms the agency has never touched can all be swept in by one phrase like "all revenue derived from your content or likeness." Ask for it to be narrowed to revenue from the accounts they actually work on.
2. Commission on fans you already had
If you arrive with 800 subscribers, a commission on total account revenue means you are paying the agency a share of an audience you built without them, every month, for as long as those people stay subscribed. The fair version is a commission on growth: on revenue above a baseline measured at signing. Almost no template offers this. Almost every agency will discuss it, because refusing makes the pitch hard to defend out loud.
3. The post-term tail
This is the single most expensive clause most creators never notice: a provision that the agency keeps earning after the contract ends. Sometimes it is framed as a "residual" on subscribers acquired during the term, sometimes as a percentage for six or twelve months after termination, sometimes as a perpetual entitlement.
There is a legitimate version — a short tail on paid advertising the agency funded out of its own pocket, so they are not left underwater on ad spend the week you leave. There is no legitimate version that runs for years, applies to organic subscribers, or has no end date at all.
4. Fees deducted before you see a number
"Management fees," "onboarding," "marketing spend," "chatter costs," "software licences." Each may be real. The red flag is deduction at source: money that leaves before it is reported to you, from an account you cannot see. Ask who holds the payout account, who can see the platform statements, and how you would independently verify the figure on your statement. If the honest answer is "you would take our word for it," that is the answer to the whole question.
Upfront fees are different and simpler. A legitimate agency is paid out of the money it helps you make. Any request for $500 to $5,000 in setup costs, deposits or "training" before you have earned anything is the oldest pattern in this industry, and the answer is no.
Worth doing the arithmetic before you argue about the number: what the percentage actually costs over a year and over the term.
The time clauses
5. Term length
Twelve months is common. Twenty-four and thirty-six month lock-ins circulate widely and are hard to justify for a service that can be judged in eight weeks. A confident agency will accept a short initial term, because they expect the results to renew it. A term longer than 180 days deserves a specific explanation of what they can do in month twenty that they cannot do in month four.
6. Auto-renewal
Automatic renewal combined with a long notice window is how a twelve-month contract becomes a three-year one. The pattern to watch: the term auto-renews annually unless you give notice, and the notice window is a narrow period several months before the renewal date. Miss it by a week and you have agreed to another year.
Ask for renewal to be by mutual written agreement instead. If it must auto-renew, ask for the notice period to be short and the window to be open, not a specific month.
7. The notice period
Thirty days is normal. Sixty is worth a conversation. Anything over sixty is worth scrutiny, and anything over ninety is a lock-in wearing a different hat — especially if the agency retains full commission throughout the notice period while quietly doing nothing.
The control clauses
8. Account access and your logins
This is the one that turns a bad contract into a crisis. Whoever holds your logins holds your income, and getting them back becomes a negotiation rather than a right.
Worth knowing: OnlyFans' own terms require one person per account and prohibit account sharing, so an arrangement built on handing over your credentials puts your account at risk from the platform as well as from the agency. Where a platform offers an official delegated-access or management feature, that is the mechanism to use — it is revocable by you, in a single click, without anyone's cooperation.
The clause you want says that you remain the sole owner of the account, that any access granted is limited and revocable, and that on termination all access ends immediately. See accounts & payments for the practical side of locking this down.
9. Who talks to your fans
Chatter teams are standard and not inherently a problem. What matters is disclosure and boundaries: whether fans are being told they are speaking to you, what the chatters are permitted to promise, what they are permitted to say about your personal life, and what happens when one of them invents something you then have to live with.
Get the boundaries written down, and get a clause that makes the agency liable for what its staff say in your voice. Also check who is legally responsible if a chatter breaches a platform rule — the ban lands on your account, not theirs.
The content and likeness clauses
10. The licence grant
You should be reading this clause with a highlighter. Phrases to stop at:
- "In perpetuity." Forever. Not for the term, not for a wind-down period — forever.
- "Irrevocable." You cannot withdraw it later, even if you fall out badly.
- "In all media now known or hereafter devised." Formats that do not exist yet, which is how content shot for a subscription page ends up somewhere nobody imagined.
- "Sublicensable" or "transferable." They can pass the rights to someone else, including whoever buys the agency.
- "Assignment" rather than "licence." An assignment transfers ownership. A licence lends it. These are not variations on the same thing.
A reasonable grant is narrow: a non-exclusive licence to use your content for the specific purpose of promoting you, for the duration of the agreement, ending when the agreement ends, with a short defined wind-down for material already published.
11. AI, voice and likeness
This is the newest clause and the one that will matter most in five years. A broad grant over your "likeness, voice and image" is, in practice, permission to train a model on you — to generate content you never shot and conversations you never had, potentially long after you have left the industry.
Federal and national IP law has real gaps here, which means the contract language is your protection rather than a backstop. Ask for an explicit prohibition: no synthetic or AI-generated content depicting you, no voice cloning, no training of models on your content, without separate written consent for each use. An agency with no such plans will sign that without blinking. Watch carefully how one that hesitates explains itself.
The exclusivity clauses
12. What you are prevented from doing
Exclusivity can be reasonable in a narrow form — not signing with a competing management company while this one is working for you. It stops being reasonable when it covers all promotion, all platforms, all brand deals and anything adjacent, which is how a management agreement quietly becomes a non-compete on your entire working life.
Check three things. Whether it restricts platforms the agency does not work on. Whether it restricts you from taking a brand deal you sourced yourself. And whether it survives termination — a post-term non-compete in this industry is very aggressive and, in several jurisdictions, of doubtful enforceability. It still costs you money and nerve to find out.
Pressure before signature
The behaviour around the contract tells you as much as the contract. The strongest single signal is any pressure to sign within 24 hours. A real commercial relationship survives you taking a week and asking a lawyer.
- Guaranteed earnings. "$10k a month guaranteed" is either a lie or a promise nobody can keep, and it is usually paired with a long lock-in.
- A password request during onboarding. Discussed above, and it is a hard no rather than a negotiation.
- No verifiable track record. No named creators willing to speak to you, no company registration you can look up, no address.
- Vague service descriptions. "Full-service management" with no deliverables, no volumes, no frequency. If it is not specified, it is not owed.
- Refusing to answer a direct question in writing. Anything they will say on a call but not in an email is a thing they intend to deny later.
What isn't a red flag
Being alert is not the same as being paranoid, and treating every clause as an attack will cost you a good deal eventually. These are normal:
- A commission itself. Someone doing real work for a share of the upside is a functioning business model, not a scam.
- A written contract with content standards, age and consent requirements, and conduct rules. Any legitimate operation asks you to agree to these. Their absence is the warning sign.
- A 30-day notice period. Perfectly ordinary. Nobody can plan around an exit with no notice at all.
- Asking for your links, your niche and your numbers. That is due diligence in the direction you want it running.
- Turning you down. An agency that accepts absolutely everyone is not selecting for anything, which tells you what its promotion is worth.
The checklist to take into the call
Ask these in writing, and keep the reply. An agency that answers all ten plainly is probably worth talking to, whatever the percentage turns out to be.
- Is the commission on gross or net, and exactly which revenue streams does it cover?
- Does it apply to subscribers I already have?
- Does anything continue to be owed after termination, and for how long?
- What is the initial term, does it auto-renew, and what is the notice period?
- Is there any fee, deposit or cost payable by me at any point?
- Will you ever need my password, and if not, what access mechanism do you use?
- What exactly are you committing to deliver, at what volume, per month?
- Does the content licence end when the contract ends?
- Will you agree in writing not to use AI or synthetic media of me?
- Can I speak to two creators who have left you?
That last one is the sharpest question in the list. Anyone can produce a happy current client.
If you have already signed
Then the useful question is no longer what to look for, it is what to do now — and the answer usually starts with securing the account before you tell anyone you are leaving. That is a whole process of its own: how to leave an OnlyFans agency without losing your account.
This list isn't exhaustive. It covers the clauses we see cause the most damage, but templates change and new ones appear — the AI clauses did not exist in this form three years ago. If a clause caught you out that isn't here, tell us and it goes in.
Related reading: how to leave an agency, accounts & payments and staying anonymous.