Where contingency is and isn't the expensive option
A contingency fee is straightforward when the alternative is nothing: no recovery, no fee. Its cost shows up on the other end. Fifteen percent of a small refund is a modest number; fifteen percent of a large one is a very different conversation about work that did not scale proportionally with the amount.
The variable that matters is whether the refund's size correlates with the effort to obtain it. For entries that are clean and eligible, it largely does not — the reconciliation and filing work is roughly the same whether the entry carried $4,000 or $400,000 of IEEPA duty.
What the broker fee is actually for
Per-entry broker fees cover licensed work: reviewing what is filed, signing it, and filing it. That work does not go away under any model, because CBP accepts filings only from the importer of record or the broker who filed the entry summaries.
What software changes is the hours behind that fee, not the fee itself — which is why brokers running the reconciliation through an engine keep billing the same per-entry rate on a fraction of the time. That is the argument on our broker page, stated plainly.
Reading a quote
Three questions make most quotes comparable. Is the fee a share of the refund, and if so is it capped? Does the price include the licensed filing, or is a broker's fee separate and on top? And what happens on entries that turn out not to be recoverable — is there a floor, a minimum, or a charge for the analysis regardless?
None of that is advice about which to choose. It is what the three models differ on.