1. Attribution and analytics platforms
Off-the-shelf tools couldn't stitch your data sources. Your team built one - and it broke, and they fixed it, and it broke differently. That iteration is experimentation.
The honest wedge
What Agencies and Consultants Can Actually Claim
Marketing services don't qualify for SRED - campaigns, creative, media buying, market research. That's the part everyone gets right. What they miss: the custom technology your agency builds to deliver those services can qualify, and for most agencies it's worth $30,000–$100,000+ per year in refundable credits.
Never qualifies
The work that never qualifies
- Campaign strategy and creative production
- Design, copywriting, media planning and buying
- SEO/SEM execution and social media management
- Market research and account management
- Routine website builds on standard platforms and templates
If a consultant tells you this stuff qualifies, walk away. That's how agencies get burned and audited.
Often qualifies
The work that often qualifies
Custom technology built because off-the-shelf tools failed - where your team hit real technical walls and iterated through them. CRA decides; we assess and document.
Assessment only · CRA decides eligibility
Six patterns
The claimable builds hiding inside agency work
2. Integrations with unstable APIs
Ad platforms, CRMs, client systems that fight back. If your devs had to reverse-engineer behavior, that's technological uncertainty.
3. Custom AI/ML tooling
Fine-tuned models, custom agents, classification systems - when accuracy plateaus forced real iteration, not just prompt tweaks.
4. Automation infrastructure
Pipelines that had to survive real-world volume. Retries, race conditions, data consistency - engineering problems, not marketing ones.
5. Proprietary client-facing platforms
Portals, reporting engines, bidding tools - where the hard part was system behavior, not features on a roadmap.
6. Failed or abandoned builds
The tool you abandoned after three months still generated technical knowledge. Failed projects can be the strongest claims.
Honesty block
Most of your payroll is probably not eligible
For a typical agency, 20–40% of technical staff time is claimable - and claiming more than you should is how you end up in a CRA review. Our job is finding the real number and defending it, not inflating it.
Not sure which bucket your work falls in? That's the whole point of the free call.