The honest math on your next hire.
An in-house marketing hire, CurrentAds, or a typical agency: total cost, scope, speed, ownership, and risk, side by side. Including the point where hiring in-house genuinely beats us, because it exists.
The comparison
Three ways to run your marketing
The scope column matters most. A customer checks search, the map pack, an AI assistant, the feed, and your reviews before they call you, and one hire cannot cover all five well.
| Factor | In-house marketing hire | CurrentAds | Typical agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash cost per year | $90,000 to $140,000 salary for one generalist, plus benefits and payroll taxes on top | From $42,000 a year at $3,500 per month, plus a one time $1,500 onboarding fee that is waived at $5,000 per month and above | Retainer plus a percentage of spend, growing as your budget grows |
| Scope covered | Nobody is senior at paid media, SEO, AI search, maps, tracking, email and SMS, CRO, creative, reputation, and web at the same time | All ten of those disciplines under one plan, each run by an operator who does that thing every day | Usually one lane, most often paid ads, with the rest sold as add-ons or quietly subcontracted |
| Tools and software | You buy the stack: rank tracking, reporting, call tracking, creative, landing page, and research tools | Included, plus a live client portal | Often billed back on top of the retainer |
| Time to live | Hiring takes months, then 60 to 90 days of ramp after the start date | Tracking verified in week one, campaigns live by day 14 | Onboarding queues; timelines are rarely in writing |
| Conversion tracking | Depends entirely on whether the person you hired has built it before | Rebuilt and verified before spend scales: test conversions fired, events deduplicated, platform numbers reconciled against your CRM | The pixel is installed, offered as the whole answer, then budget scales on unverified data |
| Contract | Employment: severance, notice periods, and a seat you pay for in slow months | Month to month, with a 30 day money back guarantee on the written kickoff plan | 12 month contracts are the norm, with early exit penalties |
| Who owns the accounts | You do | You do, always: ad accounts, analytics properties, tag containers, profiles, landing pages, creative, and lists stay in your name | Frequently agency owned; leaving means starting over |
| Pricing transparency | Salary bands are public, so you can benchmark the offer before you make it | Published on the pricing page, including the onboarding fee and when it is waived | Revealed after a qualification call, and it moves with what you look like you can pay |
| Reporting | Whatever your hire builds, in their spreadsheet | Live portal with a weekly written summary, and every number traceable to a source you own | Monthly PDF, often built to obscure more than it shows |
| Key person risk | High: one resignation and the ramp clock restarts at zero | A team, so no single departure takes your system with it | Senior faces sell the deal; juniors often run the account |
Salary and ramp figures reflect published US market ranges for senior marketing roles. The agency column describes common industry contract terms, not any single firm.
The honest part
When in-house is the right call
We would rather lose a deal than pretend this line does not exist.
01
Above roughly $150,000 a month in spend
At that scale the work is a daily full time job with enough budget to justify dedicated headcount, and the math flips toward building your own team. If you are there, hire. We will say so in your growth plan too.
02
When marketing is the whole business
If acquisition is your core competency as a company, own it. Some businesses should build that muscle internally from day one, and pretending otherwise would be selling, not advising.
03
Everyone else, do the arithmetic
Below that line you are choosing between one salary for one or two channels, or a senior team across ten disciplines for a fraction of it, live by day 14, on a month to month agreement you can leave anytime with every account still in your name.
Where to start
Not sure which side you are on?
The free growth plan settles it with data instead of a pitch: a tracking audit, a competitor teardown across search, maps, and AI answers, and a 90 day plan you can hand to an in-house hire, another agency, or us. See full pricing, everything we run, and the trial and money back terms for the terms behind the middle column.
The row this table cannot settle on its own is oversight, because the honest question is not what an outside team costs but what it shows you. Which figures land in your portal, and how to check each of them against the platform it came from without asking anyone, is set out on how we report and how you verify it. And if you want the reasoning rather than the arithmetic, the loaded cost of a first hire against what one person can genuinely cover is worked through in the arithmetic of hiring in-house instead.