Nobody prints their prices. That’s not an accident.
Ask four people what marketing costs. You’ll get four different shrugs.
The agency wants a call first. The freelancer asks your budget. The software company shows you three tiers and hides the real one.
And you’re still sitting there with the same question.
So I priced it out. Every way of buying marketing, one table, a source next to every number.
One row is the one you’re already paying.
One table holds every way to buy marketing.
Here’s the whole thing. Read the middle rows twice.
- A boutique social agency: $24,000 a year. A business owner posted it on r/Entrepreneurs.
- You do it yourself: about $1,700 a month. A bakery owner on r/smallbusiness posted the 10 hours a week. The $40 an hour is our figure.
- A specialist plus software, you approve: about $1,900, one owner’s cost. The same r/Entrepreneurs thread.
- An in-house marketing hire: no public number we trust. Nothing we could source.
- A freelancer: no public number we trust. Nothing we could source.
- Paid ads, added on top of any row above: one advertiser on r/googleads saw over 60% of the spend go to search terms they couldn’t see.
- Nothing at all: 17% of US small businesses still have no website. For 40% of the ones with one, search is their top source of new leads (Clutch, 2025).
Row three is the shape of what we do. It isn’t our quote.
Every price here has a source you can check.
I ran a search study before I wrote a word. In September 2026 I harvested 4,203 queries from Google autocomplete across 15 countries. 3,811 of them worked.
184 of those asked what marketing costs. 448 asked about outsourced or fractional marketing. Only 14 asked about follow-up speed.
So cost is the fifth most searched thing in the whole study. Nobody’s answering it.
We only print a price a stranger can go and check.
We only print a price with a name or a thread attached to it.
We only print a price built on what somebody posted in public.
We only print a price we’d still show if the person who posted it read this page.
Those rules emptied two rows.
We refresh this table every three months. (I put the reminder in my calendar, which is the least glamorous part of this job.)
Two rows stay blank, on purpose.
The in-house hire and the freelancer. We couldn’t find a number we’d stand behind.
Salary surveys quote the base and skip the rest. Payroll, software, and the months before a new person learns your business.
Freelance rates swing from one person to the next. 73% of freelancers call finding new clients a challenge, and it tops their list (Payoneer, 2023). A market that uneven never settles on one price.
A blank row beats a guess.
You can price both yourself in an afternoon. Ask three people what they charge, then add the tools they’ll need.
Doing it yourself never arrives as a bill.
Go back to the bakery row.
10 hours a week, at $40 an hour. That’s about $1,700 a month.
The agency in the other thread charged $24,000 a year.
Those two owners posted in different units. We won’t force them into one sum.
Here’s the part that doesn’t change either way. One of those owners still does the work.
The owner’s own words:
“Currently spending 10 hours weekly creating and posting content manually…” The post goes on: “Taking significant time away from actual baking and customer service which is what I’m actually good at.”
A bakery owner wrote that in r/smallbusiness.
Those 10 hours don’t show up on a bank statement.
Those 10 hours don’t show up in the year-end accounts.
Those 10 hours don’t show up until a customer asks why the bread’s late.
54% of small-business owners handle their marketing alone (BrightLocal, 2025). Most owners work 40 hours a week or more, and 19% work 60 or more (The Alternative Board, 2013).
Nobody sends you an invoice for those ten hours. That’s the only reason it feels free.
Ad spend can go where you can’t look.
Ads aren’t a way of buying marketing. They’re a cost you bolt onto whichever row you picked.
“Over 60% of that spend goes towards search terms I can’t even see. I’m literally paying for clicks with zero visibility.”
An advertiser wrote that in r/googleads.
The invoice is clear. The spend isn’t.
So compare the rows on two things. The fee, and how much of it you’ll actually see.
Ask any seller to show you the search terms. Watch what they do next.
Slow replies cost more than any of these lines.
Here’s the cost nobody puts on an invoice.
Companies that answered took 42 hours on average to reply to a new lead. 23% never replied at all. Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 companies to get that.
Reply inside 5 minutes and the lead is 21 times more likely to qualify than if you reply after 30 (MIT-affiliated lead response research). Other research found that leads called within 5 minutes converted at 8 times the rate of leads called later (InsideSales, 2021).
“They filled out our form on a Friday afternoon. We followed up Monday morning. By then they had already signed with someone else.” He goes on: “That was the most expensive weekend I ever had.”
Khiry Deal wrote that on LinkedIn.
No row in that table covers his weekend.
That’s why we treat lead management as its own line of work, not an extra somebody adds later.
We tell you the price before anyone starts work.
A specialist runs your website, your marketing, your leads and your follow-up. You approve every piece before it goes out, under your name.
You’ll see the price in writing first. You get a written scope with a fixed price within 48 hours of your call.
AI makes our specialists faster. It never makes the decisions.
The full list sits on our services page. Hold it against the table above.