How Much Does Content Marketing Cost? Prices per Post, Video, and Month

What content marketing costs, in short

Content marketing costs $150 to $800 per blog post, $40 to $150 per short-form video clip, and $1,500 to $6,000 a month on a freelance copy retainer in 2026. Everything else on this page is those numbers broken down.

Let me save you some confusion first. Content isn't priced like a service you rent. It's priced by the piece, and a retainer is a set number of pieces each month on one invoice.

That's good news for you, because pieces are easy to count. Four blog posts a month at $150 to $800 each is $600 to $3,200 (4 × $150 and 4 × $800). You can do that math before a single sales call.

If you're still deciding where content fits next to your other marketing, my guide on how to market your business covers the order. Here's what each piece costs.

Content marketing prices per deliverable

One piece of freelance content costs anywhere from $40 for a short-form clip to $8,000 for a full website's copy, and the way each piece is priced tells you where the risk sits.

Per-word pricing is the one I'd watch. At general content rates, a 1,500-word post costs $75 to $225 (1,500 × $0.05 and 1,500 × $0.15). At conversion copy rates, the same length costs $300 to $750. Word count says nothing about whether the post answers your customer's question, and paying by the word quietly rewards padding. The site's per-word copywriting rates show where each tier applies.

The video prices are for editing. Filming is its own cost, so if you don't have footage yet, give it its own budget line. For a monthly run of vertical clips, the short-form video editing rates cover batch prices.

The last two rows are mine. WhatShouldICharge doesn't publish a range for case studies or long guides, so I've priced them the way I'd scope them: 8 to 12 hours for a case study, including the interview with your customer, and 15 to 25 hours for a long guide, both at the $85 recommended copywriter rate.

Once you're publishing every month, the next question is whether to buy piece by piece or on a retainer.

Monthly content marketing retainers and what they should deliver

A freelance content retainer costs $1,500 to $6,000 a month for copy, $1,500 to $4,000 for SaaS copy, and $400 to $1,200 for a monthly batch of 10 to 20 short-form clips. The retainer price matters less than what it delivers.

A retainer with no deliverable count is a subscription to someone's attention, and attention is hard to audit. Before you sign, turn the retainer back into pieces. Say you're quoted $3,000 a month for four blog posts and two emails. At the table's prices, four posts cost $600 to $3,200 and two emails cost $300 to $1,200, so the fair range for that scope is $900 to $4,400. A $3,000 quote sits inside it. If the same scope came in at $6,000, you'd want to know what the extra $1,600 buys.

Retainers earn their price one way: a writer who knows your business writes faster and needs less briefing by the third month. That's worth paying for. A retainer that renews itself with no count attached is not.

A retainer isn't the only way to get steady content, though. The other choice is hiring someone.

In-house content marketer vs freelancer vs agency: the cost

An in-house content marketer costs about $101,600 a year once benefits are added, against $18,000 to $72,000 for a full year of a freelance copy retainer.

The in-house figure starts from the BLS median for market research analysts and marketing specialists, $78,760 a year in May 2025. Benefits beyond paid leave add 29%, based on BLS employer compensation costs, so $78,760 × 1.29 = $101,600.40. That's about $8,467 a month before software, equipment, or your time managing them. The freelance figure is $1,500 × 12 and $6,000 × 12.

Agencies sit somewhere else again. Copy agencies bill $100 to $250 an hour, against $50 to $150 in freelance copywriter rates. If you buy 40 hours of content work a month, that's $4,000 to $10,000 from an agency (40 × $100 and 40 × $250), or $3,400 at the $85 recommended freelance rate (40 × $85).

The way I'd split it: hire in-house when content is daily work that needs someone inside the business and you can keep them busy full time. Use a freelancer when you need a steady number of pieces each month. Use an agency when you need writing, video and design delivered together and don't want to manage three people.

Whichever you pick, the budget should start from what you plan to publish.

How to work out a content marketing budget from your output

A content marketing budget is your monthly output times the price of each piece: four blog posts, two newsletters and 12 short-form clips cost $1,380 to $6,200 a month at freelance prices. Here's the math, one line at a time, so you can swap in your own counts.

Blog posts: 4 × $150 to $800 = $600 to $3,200.

Newsletters: 2 × $150 to $600 = $300 to $1,200.

Short-form clips: 12 × $40 to $150 = $480 to $1,800. A monthly batch of 10 to 20 clips runs $400 to $1,200, so buying the 12 as a batch should come in lower.

Add the three and you get $1,380 to $6,200 a month, or $16,560 to $74,400 a year (× 12).

That range is wide because the writing tier moves the price: the same 1,500-word post costs $75 to $225 at general content rates of $0.05 to $0.15 a word and $300 to $750 at conversion copy rates of $0.20 to $0.50. Pick your counts first, then shop for the price.

For one-off pieces like a case study, estimate the hours and multiply by a rate. The project hours estimator does that for you, and the video editor rate calculator prices editing hours for anything longer than a clip. The rates themselves come from the site's methodology, built on BLS wage data.

The cheap end of that range is where I'd be most careful, and here's why.

Why cheap content marketing costs more

A $75 blog post (1,500 words at $0.05 a word) stops being cheap the moment someone has to fix it: if it needs 3 hours of editing at the $85 copywriter rate, that adds $255, for a total of $330, more than double the $150 floor price for a post written properly the first time.

And that's the good case, where someone catches it. The bad case is that it goes live.

Cheap content costs you in three ways I care about. It costs your time, because every weak draft comes back to you for review. It costs your credibility, because a thin post with your name on it might be the first thing a buyer reads about you. And it costs the topic, because once a weak post is published on a subject, it's the one sitting there when you'd rather have a good one.

None of that means you should buy the $800 post every time. It means price per post is the wrong thing to shop on. Shop on whether the writer asks you real questions before they start. A $150 writer who interviews you is a better buy than an $800 writer who doesn't.

Once you've found a writer worth paying, protect what you're paying for in the contract.

What a content marketing contract must spell out

A content marketing contract must spell out, in writing, that copyright in every piece transfers to you, and it must name the deliverable count and price so a $1,500 to $6,000 retainer can be checked every month. Here's the list I'd want on the page before I signed.

Ownership. Paying for a post doesn't automatically make you its copyright owner. Get a signed, written transfer of copyright for everything delivered. If you ever want to register a piece, the U.S. Copyright Office fee schedule lists the Standard Application at $65. The $45 Single Application only covers one work by one author who is also the claimant, so it doesn't fit work you bought. That's a cost note, not legal advice.

Deliverables and price per piece. The count per month, the length or format of each piece, and what happens to pieces you don't use that month.

Revisions. How many rounds are included, and what an extra round costs.

Term and exit. A 12-month retainer at $1,500 to $6,000 a month commits you to $18,000 to $72,000. Ask for a notice period you'd actually be able to use.

Disclosure. If the work includes sponsored posts or paid creators talking about your product, the FTC Endorsement Guides say a material connection must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, under 16 CFR 255.5. Write who handles that disclosure into the contract.

With those 5 terms in place, the questions below cover what's left.