Answer
Is it cheaper to do marketing in-house or hire an agency?
In-house looks cheaper until the owner's hours are priced, and those are the most expensive hours available.
It depends almost entirely on whose hours are doing the work. Outside help runs roughly $1,500–$10,000 a month, with full-service around $3,500–$8,000. In-house is cheaper only when the hours it consumes are genuinely spare.
Most in-house-versus-agency comparisons are decided by an accounting error rather than by a judgement. The software subscriptions are counted because they arrive as invoices. The hours are not counted because they arrive as evenings. Priced at anything defensible, those hours are usually the largest single line in the comparison, and they are also the least substitutable — an owner cannot hire more of their own attention.
The honest way to run the comparison is to price the time first and the tools second. Take the hours a week the work actually consumes, multiply by what an hour of that person's time is worth to the business, and add the software. Compare the total against the market band for equivalent outside help. The answer is frequently uncomfortable in the direction people do not expect: the in-house version is not marginally cheaper, it is more expensive and slower, and it has been running that way for years because nobody put a rate against the hours.
The comparison also hides a difference that is not about cost at all. Outside help is bought in a scope; in-house work expands to fill whatever attention is left. A retainer that covers one funnel produces one funnel. The same work in-house tends to produce a half-finished version of four things, because there is no external boundary forcing the choice, and half-finished systems are where most of the wasted spend in small businesses actually sits.
There is a real case for in-house and it is worth stating plainly, because a page arguing only one way is not much use. If the work is genuinely being done by someone whose hours are spare, if it is small and stable enough not to need continuous judgement, and if the business is content for it to move slowly, doing it yourself is correct and the market band is irrelevant. What is not correct is arriving at that conclusion by leaving the hours out of the sum.
Doing it yourself is not free. It is paid for in the only hours the business cannot buy more of, and those hours never appear on the comparison.
Siddharth Sharma, Context Theory
Related questions
What rate should I use for my own hours?
Something you could defend rather than something flattering. A reasonable floor is what you would pay someone to take the task off you; a reasonable ceiling is what the business earns in the hours you would otherwise spend on the highest-value thing you do. If those two numbers are far apart, the gap is itself the answer.
Isn't hiring someone the third option?
It is, and it changes the arithmetic rather than the method. A salary is a fixed cost with recruitment, ramp-up and management attached, so the comparison becomes total employment cost against the band, plus the question of whether one generalist hire can cover the range a scoped engagement does. The hours still have to be priced either way.
METHOD
Every figure below carries its source and the date it was verified. Nothing on this page is asserted.
The numbers on this page.
| What | Value | Specific to |
|---|---|---|
| Meaningful market band | $1,500–$10,000 | This page |
| US SMB full-service retainer | $3,500–$8,000 | This page |
| US SMB retainer, focused one-to-two-service engagement | $1,500–$4,000 | Category-wide |
2026 agency pricing survey · per month · verified
Start with the measurement.
Reading about a benchmark is not the same as knowing your own number. The audit produces yours, measured rather than estimated.
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