Agency, freelancer, or in-house
The fully-loaded monthly cost of all three, including the management time nobody puts in the spreadsheet, and a rule for choosing.
The comparison is usually made wrong, because it compares an invoice to a salary and stops there. An invoice is a complete number. A salary is about two thirds of one.
What does a freelancer actually cost?
A competent Meta freelancer runs somewhere between a few hundred and around two thousand pounds a month, depending on whether they are managing your account or also making things for it. That is the invoice. It is not the cost.
The cost includes the creative you now have to produce, because most freelancers buy media and do not make ads. It includes the briefing, because a freelancer with eight clients works from what you send. And it includes the risk premium of one person: no cover during holidays, no second opinion, and a hard stop if they take a full-time role.
In our experience the freelancer arrangement fails in one specific way. It works well for a year, the account plateaus, and nobody in the arrangement is responsible for the ideas that would break the plateau. Maintenance is not a strategy failure. It is just what you bought.
What does an agency actually cost?
Stackmatix's 2026 guide to Facebook ads agency pricing puts flat retainers in a band that runs from roughly $1,500 to $10,000 a month, with percentage-of-spend arrangements at 10 to 20 per cent. The 2026 Agency Pricing Survey reported by Ryze found roughly 42 per cent of agencies on flat fees, 31 per cent on a percentage of spend, and 27 per cent on a hybrid.
What you are buying at that price is not hours. It is a bench: someone who buys media, someone who makes the creative, someone who has seen your category fail before. What you give up is exclusivity of attention — you are one of several accounts, and on a bad month you will feel it.
The hidden cost is the approval loop. Every agency arrangement has one, and a slow one destroys the value of the fast bench you just hired. If creative waits nine days for your feedback, you are paying agency rates for freelancer output.
What does in-house actually cost?
Here is where the spreadsheet usually lies. Glassdoor's 2026 United States figures put the average paid media specialist at $70,850 a year and the average performance marketing manager at $108,179, with a typical range of $81,676 to $144,900. Those are salaries, not costs.
As a planning rule, add roughly a quarter to a third on top for employer taxes, benefits, equipment, software and the share of recruitment cost the hire has to carry. Then add the ramp: a new hire is not fully productive for a quarter, and a bad hire costs you two before you know. Then remember that one person in-house is still one person, so you have bought the freelancer's single-point risk at four times the price — with the added feature that it takes months to replace rather than a week.
What in-house genuinely buys is context. Someone who sits in your business learns your customers, your margins and your seasonality in a way no external party does. That is worth a great deal. It is worth it later than most founders think.
What does it cost to manage each option?
The line nobody prices. Every arrangement consumes hours of a senior person — usually the founder — in briefing, approving, chasing and reading reports. Those hours have a cost, and it is the highest hourly rate in the building.
| Freelancer | Agency | In-house hire | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct monthly cost | Roughly $500–$2,000 | Roughly $1,500–$10,000 flat, or 10–20% of spend | $70,850–$108,179 a year in salary alone |
| Loaded monthly cost | Same, plus creative you produce | Same as invoice — the bench is inside it | Add about 25–30% for tax, benefits, tools and equipment |
| Your hours per week | 3–5, briefing and making creative | 1–2, approvals and one weekly read | 4–6 at first, 2–3 once they know the business |
| Creative produced | Usually none — you supply it | A stated monthly count, if you wrote it into scope | As much as one person can make, which is not much |
| Ramp to useful | Days | Two to four weeks | One quarter, sometimes two |
| Cover if they vanish | None | Another person on the bench | None, for months |
| Category experience | Whatever they happen to have | Several accounts, several failures | Yours only, learned on your budget |
| Notice to stop | Usually immediate | Thirty days, if the contract is honest | Redundancy process and cost |
| Best at | Keeping a working account working | Producing new ideas at volume | Deep context and long-horizon work |
Put your own hourly cost against the third row before you decide anything. A freelancer at $800 a month who takes four hours of your week is not cheaper than an agency at $3,000 that takes one, if your hour is worth anything at all.
Can you combine them?
Yes, and the best-run accounts we see do. The pattern that works is an in-house owner and an external maker: one person inside who holds the number, the margins and the calendar, and an external team producing creative volume against it.
The pattern that does not work is two parties who both think they own the account. It ends in an ad set nobody will admit to editing, and a monthly meeting about who paused what.
When is an agency the wrong answer?
When the work is genuinely maintenance. If your creative wins have been stable for months, your offer is not changing, and the account only needs someone to watch budgets and swap in a seasonal image, an agency fee buys you capability you will not use. Hire a freelancer and keep the difference.
It is also the wrong answer when the knowledge you need is knowledge about your own business rather than about advertising. A complicated pricing model, a long sales cycle with a human at the end, a category with real regulation — those reward someone sitting inside the company. We would rather tell you that on the first call than bill you for a year of learning your industry.
The decision rule
One question, asked in order, and stop at the first yes.
- Is the account mostly being maintained rather than changed? Hire a freelancer.
- Is the constraint the number of good new ideas that reach market each month? Hire an agency, on a flat fee, against an agreed number.
- Is the constraint knowledge of your own business — pricing, margin, cycle, regulation — rather than knowledge of the platform? Hire in-house, and pay properly.
- Are you spending enough that a full-time salary is a small share of media, and do you have the ideas problem too? Hire in-house to own it, and an external team to make things.
The rule is deliberately not about company size. We have seen small companies where the ideas problem was acute and large ones where the account only needed watching. Size predicts your budget. It does not predict your constraint, and the constraint is what you are buying against.