What Should You Actually Pay for Growth Marketing?

You’ve decided your company needs proper growth marketing. Maybe you’ve been burned by an agency. Maybe you’ve been doing it yourself and hit a ceiling. Maybe your marketing team is good at execution but has no system tying it all together.

Whatever brought you here, the next question is always the same: what should this actually cost?

The honest answer is that pricing in this space is a mess. Agencies charge monthly retainers with no clear end date. Consultants charge by the hour for advice you then have to implement yourself. Freelancers charge per project but often lack the strategic depth to build anything that compounds.

This guide breaks down what growth marketing costs across every model, what you’re actually paying for in each case, and how to figure out which approach makes sense for a company doing $1M-$10M in revenue.

The Four Models (and What They Really Cost)

1. Marketing Agency Retainers

Typical cost: $5,000 – $25,000/month
Commitment: 6-12 month contracts (sometimes month-to-month, but rare for good agencies)

This is the model most companies default to. You sign a retainer, get assigned an account manager, and a team of specialists works on your marketing.

What you get:
A team handling execution across channels. Usually, some combination of paid ads, SEO, email, and content. Strategy calls. Monthly reports.

What you don’t get:
A system you own. When you leave the agency, you leave with whatever they built inside their accounts. Some agencies are better about this than others, but the incentive structure is clear: they want you dependent, not independent.

The real issue:
You’re paying for headcount, not outcomes. The account manager on your business is often 2-3 years into their career. The senior strategist who pitched you is managing 15 other accounts. The work gets done, but it’s execution without architecture.

Agencies work well for companies that need ongoing channel management and have an internal strategist directing the work. They work badly for companies that need someone to design the entire growth system from scratch.

Cost per year: $60,000 – $300,000

2. Freelance Growth Marketers

Typical cost: $75 – $200/hour or $2,000 – $8,000/project
Commitment: Project-by-project

Freelancers are flexible and often cheaper than agencies. You get one person who does the work directly, no account manager middlemen. (If you’re specifically looking for a copywriter, we’ve written a separate guide on how to hire a copywriter who drives revenue.)

What you get:
Direct access to the person doing the work. Speed, usually. Less overhead means more gets done per dollar spent.

What you don’t get:
System-level thinking, usually. Most freelancers specialise in one channel: Facebook ads, email marketing, SEO content. They’re good at the thing they do, but they’re not building you a growth engine that connects acquisition to retention to referral.

The real issue:
You end up project-managing multiple freelancers across different channels. Nobody’s looking at the whole picture. You become the strategist by default, even if that’s not your strength.

Freelancers work well for specific, contained projects where you know exactly what you need. They work badly when you need someone to diagnose the problem first, then build the solution.

Cost per year: Varies wildly. $30,000 – $100,000+ depending on scope.

3. Marketing Consultants

Typical cost: $200 – $500/hour or $5,000 – $20,000/month advisory retainer
Commitment: Monthly or quarterly

Consultants sell access to their brain. You get strategy, frameworks, and advice. The execution is on you.

What you get:
Senior-level thinking. Someone who’s seen your type of problem before and can map out a plan. Good consultants save you from expensive mistakes.

What you don’t get:
The work done. You leave the call with a strategy deck and a to-do list. If your team can execute it, great. If they can’t, you’ve paid for an expensive PDF.

The real issue:
The gap between strategy and execution is where most growth plans die. Knowing what to do and actually building it are different skills. A consultant tells you to “build an email nurture sequence for your mid-funnel leads.” You still need to figure out the segmentation, write the copy, set up the automation, and test it.

Consultants work well for companies with strong execution teams who need strategic direction. They work badly for companies that need someone to actually build the thing.

Cost per year: $60,000 – $240,000

4. Fractional CMO / Done-for-You Builds

Typical cost: $5,000 – $15,000/month or $10,000 – $30,000 per project
Commitment: 1-6 months, fixed scope

This is the newest model and the one that’s growing fastest among $1M-$10M companies. You hire a senior growth operator for a fixed period to build a specific system, then they hand it over.

What you get:
Senior strategy and execution in one package. One person who diagnoses the problem, designs the solution, builds it inside your accounts, trains your team, and leaves.

What you don’t get:
Ongoing management. This model is designed to end. Once the system is built and your team can run it, the engagement finishes.

The real issue:
Finding someone good is hard. The market is full of people calling themselves “fractional CMOs” who are really freelancers with a fancier title. The difference is system-level thinking: can they build an entire growth engine, or can they just run one channel well?

This model works well for companies that need a growth system built from scratch but don’t want the ongoing cost of an agency or the risk of hiring a full-time head of growth at $150K+/year.

Cost per year: $10,000 – $60,000 (since the engagement has a defined end)

Comparing the Models Side by Side

Factor	Agency	Freelancer	Consultant	Fractional / Build
Monthly cost	$5K-$25K	$2K-$8K	$5K-$20K	$5K-$15K
Who does the work	Junior team	The freelancer	You	Senior operator
Strategy included	Sometimes	Rarely	Yes	Yes
Execution included	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
You own everything	Often not	Usually	N/A	Yes
Contract length	6-12 months	Per project	Monthly	1-6 months
Best for	Ongoing management	Contained projects	Strategic direction	Building systems

What $1M-$10M Companies Actually Need

If you’re in this revenue range, you’ve probably got a few things in common:

You have product-market fit. Revenue is coming in, but it’s not predictable. Growth has been driven by a mix of referrals, founder hustle, and whatever the last agency left behind. There’s no system connecting the pieces.

Your marketing team, if you have one, is good at posting and publishing but doesn’t have a strategic framework connecting acquisition to retention to referral. Campaigns happen. But they don’t compound.

Here’s what you need: someone to build the machine, not someone to keep pressing buttons on the machine that doesn’t exist yet.

That’s why the agency model often disappoints companies at this stage. You don’t need someone to manage your Google Ads. You need someone to figure out why your entire growth system isn’t working and then build one that does.

How to Evaluate Any Growth Marketing Provider

Regardless of which model you choose, ask these five questions:

1. “What will I own at the end of this?”
If the answer is “access to our platform” or “your account with us,” you’re renting. You want to own the assets: the email sequences, the landing pages, the automations, the SOPs. All built inside your accounts.

2. “Who will actually do the work?”
The person on the pitch call should be the person doing the work. If there’s a handoff to a “delivery team” after you sign, you’re getting a junior.

3. “How do you measure success?”
If they can’t name specific metrics tied to revenue, they’re measuring activity, not impact. Deliverables aren’t results. “We’ll publish 8 blog posts a month” is not a growth strategy.

4. “What happens after the contract ends?”
If you can’t run your marketing without them after the engagement, they haven’t built you a system. They’ve built you a dependency.

5. “Can you show me results from a company like mine?”
Not just big logos. Specific results from companies at your revenue stage, in a similar situation. Case studies beat client lists every time.

What “Too Cheap” Looks Like

There’s a floor below which you’re not getting growth marketing. You’re getting activity.

If someone quotes $1,000/month for “full growth marketing,” they’re spreading themselves across too many clients to give you real attention. They’ll run some ads, send some emails, and hand you a report that looks busy.

Growth marketing at this level requires strategic thinking, not just execution. Strategy takes time. Time costs money.

Rule of thumb for $1M-$10M companies: If you’re spending less than $5,000/month on growth marketing (whether agency, freelance, or fractional), you’re probably getting tactical work without strategic architecture. That’s how you end up with disconnected campaigns that don’t compound.

What “Too Expensive” Looks Like

On the other end, there’s a ceiling above which you’re paying for brand, not value.

Enterprise agencies charging $30K-$50K/month make sense for companies doing $50M+. For a company at $3M revenue, that spend is out of proportion to the return it can generate.

The best investment at the $1M-$10M stage is a one-time build that creates infrastructure you own. A system that generates pipeline predictably, without requiring a five-figure monthly retainer to maintain.

The Smart Play

For most companies in the $1M-$10M range, the smartest investment is a fixed-price, fixed-timeline engagement that builds a complete growth system.

Not a retainer that runs forever. Not hourly advice you have to implement yourself. Not a freelancer who handles one channel while the rest falls apart.

A single engagement where someone senior diagnoses the bottleneck, builds the system across acquisition, conversion, and retention, deploys it inside your own accounts, and hands it over with documentation so your team can run it. That’s the model behind the 90-Day Growth Stack.

That’s what compounds. Because instead of paying $15K/month for an agency to manage campaigns that disappear when you stop paying, you pay once for infrastructure that keeps running.

For more on building your growth knowledge as a founder, check out our guide to the best growth marketing resources.

If that approach sounds like what your company needs, start with a free Growth Audit. No pitch. Just a diagnostic of where your growth is leaking and what it would take to fix it.