I would chime in and saw cost is a huge started point, Indy’s are 400-1000k/hr agency are 250-300$. Indy has less bookings and certainly can be more reliable but outside my last trip I don’t think I had a single agency booking issue. Vog had a duo and both cancelled on me once night but the booker was awesome and scrambled for me and appreciate the efforts, I got gifts for bookers last trip, has a picky customer I ask a lot of questions as have certain likes and requests and with agency they look for answers, Indy is usually we can talk about that face to face and half the time don’t do what I want.I honestly can see virtually no reason at all to use agencies and reading through here I struggle to understand why people continue to do so. The single benefit used to be that you could book someone on short notice if you were coming in from out of town or some such and these days everyone complains about how difficult it is to book someone at all through the agencies, or at least the "good" ones. I can't speak to that personally lately because I haven't used agencies for years, but that seems to be a regular board comment these days, with respect to the difficulty in booking. My viewpoint is clearly going to be different than that of some of the guys here, but the rigidity, lack of flexibility and the booking hurdles make agencies an absolute last resort from my standpoint. Still, I get that my approach to stuff is not the standard approach and I have no doubt that some guys see benefits in it that I don't, with everyone's use case being different.
My 2 cents