Media Puppies
Agency vs in-house cost calculator
Comparing a salary to a retainer is the wrong comparison, and it usually flatters hiring. This adds the costs that only appear once the person has started.
Set from your location. The maths is the same in any currency — only the labels change.
Gross, before any on-costs.
Benefits, insurance, statutory contributions.
Reporting, call tracking, competitor research, creative.
Agency fee or your own time. Spread it over one year.
Months before the hire is fully productive.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or stored anywhere.
The comparison people actually make
Salary versus retainer. It is the wrong one, and it almost always makes hiring look better than it is, because a salary is the smallest part of what an employee costs.
What gets left out
- Employer on-costs. Benefits and statutory contributions add meaningfully to the headline figure.
- Tools. A media buyer needs reporting, competitor research, call tracking and creative software. An agency already owns these and spreads them across clients.
- Recruitment. Either a fee or weeks of your own time. Real money either way.
- Ramp-up. A good hire takes a quarter to be fully productive. You pay for twelve months and get nine.
- Single point of failure. One person cannot cover their own leave, illness or resignation. When they go, the account knowledge goes with them.
What the numbers usually show
In year one an agency is normally cheaper. From year two the employee is cheaper, provided they stay and provided the role is genuinely full-time. The honest decision therefore turns on two questions: is there enough work to fill a full-time role, and how confident are you of retention in a market where good media buyers are actively recruited?
The hybrid most teams land on: hire the strategist, outsource the execution. It is also the cheapest of the three.
What this calculator cannot weigh
Quality. A brilliant hire beats a mediocre agency and the reverse is equally true. Use this to size the financial question, then decide on the thing that actually matters, which is who will do better work on your account.
If you want execution without the headcount, our dedicated media buyer page explains the middle option, and white label covers agencies buying capacity rather than staff.
Questions
Does this work for any role, or just media buyers?+
Any role you could outsource. The structure is the same for SEO, design or development — only the tool costs and ramp-up differ.
What ramp-up should I assume?+
Three months is a reasonable default for an experienced hire joining an established account. Six is more honest for a junior, or for a complex product.
Should I count my own management time?+
If you want the full picture, yes — an employee needs managing and an agency needs far less of it. It is not in the calculator because estimates of it vary wildly and people tend to put in a number that proves what they already wanted.
Is the cheapest option the right one?+
Often not. This sizes the financial question so you can stop arguing about it and decide on quality, control and risk instead.
Embed this calculator
Free to use on your own site. Copy this into your page — the attribution line is the only condition.
The paragraph below the iframe is the part that matters: an iframe's contents are served from our domain, so a link inside it is not a link from your page. The paragraph is. The small script just resizes the frame to fit your column — drop it if you prefer, the fixed height still works.
Other free tools
Want someone to run the campaigns behind these numbers?
We run Meta and Google ads for businesses where one customer is worth real money. You will get a straight answer on whether paid works for you — including “not yet”.
Get a free lead plan →