Hire or retain,with the hidden costs in.
A salary looks cheaper than a retainer until you load in benefits, taxes, software, management time, and the months a new hire spends getting up to speed. This puts the fully-loaded cost of a hire next to your agency fee, so you compare the real numbers instead of the sticker ones.
Your numbers
What you'd pay the in-house marketer before anything else.
Benefits, payroll taxes, software seats, and the cut of a manager's time the hire consumes — usually 25–40% on top of base.
The stack an in-house hire needs that an agency already owns: analytics, ad tools, design, automation.
How long before a new hire works at full output. The agency runs at speed from week one.
How much of full output a new hire misses while ramping — you pay full salary for it either way. 50% (roughly half output while learning) is the default assumption.
Your all-in monthly fee to the agency for the same scope of work.
The verdict
In-house annual cost
$100,600
Agency annual cost
$72,000
Annual difference
$28,600
Agency costs less per year.
Cheaper option
$72,000
Agency
In-house / month
$8,383
Ramp drag (year 1)
$12,575
Lost output while the hire ramps, at 50% of full output missed.
Loaded cost, head to head
What the in-house number is made of
Base salary is 70% of the real cost. The rest is overhead and tooling the sticker price never shows.
Reverse-solve · the break-even retainer
What retainer makes them even?
Break-even retainer
$9,431
Per month, matching year-1 in-house.
Your retainer vs that
$3,431
Agency is under the line.
With a 3-month ramp, your in-house hire's first-year loaded cost is $113,175. An agency is cheaper than that hire any month it stays under $9,431. Yours is at $6,000 — under the line, so the agency wins on first-year cost.
Sensitivity · ramp is the swing factor
How ramp moves the year-1 gap
| Ramp months | In-house year 1 | vs agency |
|---|---|---|
| 0 mo | $100,600 | +$28,600 |
| 2 mo | $108,983 | +$36,983 |
| 4 mo | $117,367 | +$45,367 |
| 6 mo | $125,750 | +$53,750 |
| 8 mo | $134,133 | +$62,133 |
The salary, overhead, retainer, and your 50% output-lost assumption never change across this table — only ramp months do. A longer ramp inflates the first-year in-house cost and widens the agency's edge, because an agency starts at full speed and a hire doesn't.
Your move
You've costed both. I'll tell you which one actually fits.
In-house $100,600/yr vs agency $72,000/yr → agency saves $28,600 a year.
The math is the easy part — the right call depends on your scope, stage, and how predictable the work is. Send me your situation and I'll tell you straight whether to hire, retain, or run a hybrid, and where the wasted spend is hiding either way. Free, and you keep the read whether you work with me or not.
Plain English
A salary is the down payment, not the price.
When founders weigh hiring against keeping an agency, they almost always compare the wrong two numbers: the base salary against the monthly retainer × 12. On that math the hire usually looks like a bargain. It isn't — base salary is the smallest part of what an employee actually costs.
Load in the rest and the picture changes. Benefits and payroll taxes alone add roughly 25–40% on top of base. Then there's the software a single hire needs that an agency already owns across its whole client base, and the slice of a senior person's week spent managing, reviewing, and unblocking that hire. None of it shows up on the offer letter; all of it shows up in your P&L.
Finally there's ramp: the months a new hire spends learning your business before they ship at full output. You pay full salary for partial productivity the entire time. This calculator folds every one of those costs into one fully-loaded annual figure and sets it beside your agency fee — so the comparison is honest, not flattering to whichever option you already wanted.
The formula
In-house annual = salary × (1 + overhead%) + tools × 12 · Agency annual = retainer × 12
A $70,000 hire at 30% overhead costs $91,000 before tools. Add $800/mo of software ($9,600) and the loaded cost is $100,600 a year. A $6,000/mo agency runs $72,000 — so the agency is $28,600 cheaper annually, before you even count the ramp drag while the new hire gets up to speed.
The number's in. Which way should you lean?
Agency is cheaper AND your needs are broad or spiky.
Lean agency. You get a full bench — strategist, designer, media buyer, analyst — for less than one loaded salary, with no ramp and no management overhead. A single hire can't cover that range, and you're not paying a team to sit idle in slow months.
In-house is cheaper AND the work is steady, deep, and core.
Lean hire. When the workload is full-time, predictable, and central to the business, an owned operator who lives inside your product and data will out-execute an outside team — once they're ramped. The cost gap pays for control and focus.
The two are within ~15% of each other.
Cost isn't the deciding factor — speed and control are. Need output this quarter? Agency. Building a durable internal capability? Hire. Don't let a rounding-error difference make a strategic call for you.
In-house wins on paper but you forgot ramp and management.
Re-run it. Push ramp to a realistic 3–4 months and overhead to 35%+ if a senior person will manage the hire. Those two inputs flip more of these comparisons than any other — and they're the ones founders chronically underestimate.
Beyond the cost line: what each side actually buys
01Agency buys breadth
One retainer covers a whole skill set — strategy, creative, media, analytics. Replacing that in-house means three or four hires, not one.
02Agency buys speed
No hiring cycle, no ramp. Work starts the week you sign, which matters most when you need results this quarter, not next year.
03Agency buys flexibility
Scale scope up or down with a conversation. A salary is a fixed cost you carry through every slow month and every pivot.
04In-house buys focus
Your hire works only on you. No shared attention, no competing client priorities, no waiting in a queue behind a bigger account.
05In-house buys context
An owned operator lives inside your product, data, and customers. That accumulated context compounds in a way an outside team can't match.
06In-house buys control
Direct management, instant priority changes, and a person whose incentives are fully tied to your outcomes — once they're past the ramp.
07Watch the management tax
Every junior hire needs senior time to direct and review. Bake that into overhead, or it quietly eats the savings you thought you had.
08Don't ignore turnover risk
A hire can quit, taking the context with them and resetting ramp to zero. An agency relationship has built-in redundancy across its team.
09Hybrid is a real option
Many companies keep a lean in-house lead and use an agency for execution and overflow. The cheapest answer is sometimes 'some of each.'
10Re-run this every renewal
Scope, salaries, and retainers all drift. A decision that was right at $4k/mo and one hire may not survive contact with $9k/mo and a full team.
The vocabulary
- Fully-loaded cost
- An employee's total annual cost to the business — base salary plus benefits, taxes, software, and management overhead. Typically 1.25–1.4× base.
- Overhead
- Everything paid on top of base salary: benefits, payroll taxes, software seats, equipment, and the cost of managing the person.
- Ramp
- The period a new hire spends reaching full productivity. You pay full salary for partial output the whole time.
- Ramp drag
- The cost of that lost productivity during ramp — modeled here as the in-house monthly cost × ramp months × the output-lost percentage (default 50%, i.e. roughly half output while learning, which you can adjust).
- Retainer
- A fixed recurring fee paid to an agency for an agreed scope of work, usually monthly.
- Blended team
- An agency's mix of specialists — strategist, designer, media buyer, analyst — billed under one retainer instead of as separate hires.
Hire vs agency, straight answers
Run the fully-loaded numbers: a $70,000 hire at 30% overhead plus $800/mo in tools costs about $100,600 a year — often more than a $6,000/mo ($72,000) agency, a ~$28,600 gap before ramp. That said, it depends on the loaded numbers, not the base salary. The honest comparison only appears once you load benefits, taxes, software, management, and ramp onto the salary, which is exactly what this calculator does.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.