Before anything else: we are an agency. You should read what follows with the appropriate suspicion, and I will try to earn it by being specific about the situations where hiring us would be a mistake.
The question usually arrives phrased as a budget comparison — an agency retainer against a salary. That comparison is almost always wrong in both directions, and it is the wrong question anyway.
What each actually costs
In-house. A competent paid media manager's salary is the start, not the total. Add employer taxes, equipment, software, recruitment cost, and the management time to hire and supervise them. The fully loaded figure is meaningfully above the headline salary in every market I have hired in.
Then add the part nobody budgets for: one person cannot be good at paid social, search, tracking, creative strategy and analytics simultaneously. You will hire for a blend and get depth in one of them. And when that person is on holiday, the account is unattended.
Freelancer. Cheapest per hour and genuinely the right answer more often than agencies admit. You get a specialist for a defined job. The risks are concentration and continuity: one person with other clients, no cover when they are ill, and no second opinion when something stops working. Quality varies more here than in either other option, in both directions — some of the best operators I know are freelancers.
Agency. More expensive per hour, and you are buying a team rather than a person. The honest version is that you are paying for breadth, cover, and the pattern recognition that comes from seeing many accounts. The honest downside is that you are one client among several, and at smaller retainers you are often not getting the senior people who were on the pitch.
That last point is worth asking about directly, and the answer is easy to verify: ask who will actually be in the account every week, and whether that person is on the call.
What each is good at
Freelancer — one clearly defined channel or project, where you already know what needs doing and mainly need hands. Also the sensible answer at low spend, where an agency's fee would be a large fraction of the media budget.
Agency — several channels that need to agree with each other, or a situation where you do not yet know what the problem is. Diagnosis is the thing agencies are genuinely better at, because they have seen the same failure fifty times.
In-house — deep product and customer knowledge, speed of iteration, and institutional memory. Nobody external will ever understand your margins, your supply constraints or your customers as well as someone sitting in the business.
Where the answer changes
Rough thresholds rather than rules, from the accounts I have seen:
Under about $2,000 a month in ad spend. Usually a freelancer, or doing it yourself with an audit once or twice a year. At this level agency fees are a large share of total spend and the constraint is rarely campaign management — it is the offer or the website. We turn down work at this level fairly often for exactly that reason.
Roughly $2,000 to $30,000 a month. This is agency territory, and it is where we work. Enough spend to justify specialists, not enough to build a team with the same breadth in-house.
Above roughly $30,000 a month. The arithmetic starts to favour hiring. At that spend a dedicated in-house person is cheaper than an equivalent retainer and will know the business better. Many brands here keep an agency for one specialism or for strategic review and run the day-to-day internally.
Any spend, but the business is complicated. Regulated industries, unusual sales cycles, heavy product knowledge — in-house tends to win earlier than the spend alone would suggest, because context beats technique.
The hybrid most people land on
The best setups I see are rarely pure. A marketing manager in-house who owns strategy, the customer relationship and the brand, with specialists outside for the technical execution — paid media, tracking, development.
That works because it puts the irreplaceable thing (knowing the business) inside, and the commoditisable thing (knowing the platform) outside, where it can be swapped without losing institutional memory.
It fails when the in-house person is too junior to judge the outside specialists. Someone has to be able to tell whether the work is good, and a report nobody can evaluate is worse than no report.
How to avoid getting this wrong
Write down the actual problem first. "We need Google Ads managed" and "we do not know why our leads stopped converting" lead to different hires. The second is a diagnosis job; a pair of hands will not solve it.
Ask who does the work. Not who manages the account — who is in it on Tuesday. If that person is not on the sales call, ask why.
Agree what you will judge it on before starting. Not impressions. A number that can go wrong: qualified leads, cost per acquisition against your real margin, revenue that can be reconciled with your accounts.
Keep ownership of everything. Ad accounts, analytics, domains, pixels — in your name, with the specialist given access. This matters most on the day the relationship ends, which is the day it is hardest to arrange. Nine questions worth asking before you sign anything covers the rest of the vetting.
Give it long enough to judge, and no longer. Paid media needs about three months to be assessed fairly. Six months without a clear trajectory is not patience, it is avoidance.
When we are the wrong answer
To be concrete, because a page like this is worthless otherwise. Do not hire us if you are spending under about $1,000 a month — fix the offer or the site first. Do not hire us if you need the engagement conducted in a language other than English. Do not hire us if what you actually want is a guaranteed return, because we will not give you one and we publish our reasons. And if you have strong in-house capability and simply need more hands, a freelancer will serve you better and cost less.
If what you need is someone to work out why the numbers stopped making sense, and then fix it, that is the thing we are good at.
The short version
Compare fully loaded costs, not salary against retainer. Match the option to the problem: hands, diagnosis, or context. Use the spend thresholds as a sanity check. And whichever you choose, keep ownership of your accounts and agree in advance what success is measured on.
Related: a healthy-looking ROAS can still leave nothing in the bank, which is the most common reason a business concludes its current arrangement is not working.
Our pricing is published so you can run the comparison without a sales call. If you want an outside read before deciding anything, the free growth audit will tell you in writing what we think the actual problem is — including when the answer is that you do not need an agency.