Sooner or later every growing business runs the same numbers: an agency quote sits next to the salary for a marketing hire, the freelancer's day rate sits underneath both, and somebody says "the salary looks cheaper." It usually isn't — but not for the reasons agencies normally give. Here's the comparison done properly, including the costs that never make it into the spreadsheet.
We should be upfront: we're an agency, so we have an obvious interest here. That's exactly why this piece spends as much time on when not to use one. There are businesses that should absolutely hire in-house, and telling you otherwise would be a bad way to earn your trust.
Route 1: hiring in-house
You bring a marketer onto the payroll. They're yours full-time, they learn your business deeply, and they're in the room for every conversation.
The costs people count: salary.
The costs people forget: superannuation on top of salary. Payroll tax if you're over the threshold. Annual leave, sick leave and public holidays — you're paying for roughly forty-six working weeks, not fifty-two. Recruitment cost, whether that's an agency fee or your own time. Equipment. And then the software: a marketer needs analytics, design tools, scheduling, email platform, SEO tooling, stock imagery. Individually modest, collectively a real line item that an agency absorbs into its fee because it spreads the same licences across many clients.
The cost nobody counts: your time managing them. A marketing hire needs direction, feedback, priorities and someone to unblock them. If you're the founder, that's your attention, and it's the scarcest resource in the business.
The risk nobody prices: one person can only be good at so much. Modern marketing spans strategy, copy, design, paid media, SEO, analytics, video and automation. Nobody is genuinely strong at all of it. You're hiring one person's particular mix of strengths and hoping it matches what your business actually needs — and if they leave, all of it walks out the door at once.
The Multiplier Nobody Mentions
A useful rule when comparing: the true annual cost of an employee is meaningfully higher than their salary once on-costs, leave, tooling and management time are included. Compare that fully-loaded figure against an agency retainer — not the base salary. Comparing a salary to a retainer is comparing a wholesale number to a retail one.
Route 2: freelancers
You engage individual specialists for specific work — a copywriter, a designer, a paid media contractor — usually on a day rate or per-project basis.
Where freelancers genuinely win: flexibility and specialist depth at a fair price. You pay only for what you use. You can hire a genuine expert in one narrow thing for exactly as long as you need them. For businesses with clear, well-defined, occasional needs, this is often the smartest option available and it's under-used.
Where it gets expensive: coordination. One freelancer is simple. Four freelancers means you are now the account manager — briefing each one, keeping them consistent with each other, chasing timelines, making sure the ad copy matches the landing page which matches the email. That coordination is real work, it's usually unpaid, and it lands on the person who has least time for it.
The other risk: availability. Good freelancers are busy. The one who's perfect for you may be unavailable exactly when you need them, and continuity across a long campaign isn't guaranteed.
Route 3: an agency
You engage a team who bring their own strategy, production, tooling and process.
What you're actually buying — and this is the part agencies explain badly — isn't labour. It's three things: a range of skills you couldn't justify hiring individually, tooling already paid for, and pattern recognition from having watched the same problems play out across many businesses.
Where agencies genuinely earn it: breadth, continuity and speed to competence. There's no ramp-up on how paid search works or how to structure a site for search. Nobody goes on annual leave and stops the work. When the strategy needs to change, the skills for the new direction are already in the room.
Where agencies are the wrong answer: if your marketing need is genuinely narrow and constant — say, one channel, run the same way every week — you're paying for breadth you don't use. If you need someone embedded in daily operations, sitting in on sales calls, learning the product at a level only immersion teaches, an agency is a worse fit than a hire. And if the relationship is set up so the agency never learns your business properly, you get generic work at a premium price, which is the worst outcome on this page.
The Hybrid Most Businesses Land On
The pattern that works most often isn't a pure choice. It's one capable in-house person who owns the marketing — knows the business, holds the relationships, makes the calls — supported by an agency or specialists for the things that need depth, tooling or scale. You get the immersion of a hire and the range of a team without paying full freight for either.
How to decide, honestly
Four questions get most businesses to the right answer.
How much marketing work is there, really? If it's less than a full-time job, don't create a full-time job. That sounds obvious and it's the single most common expensive mistake — a full-time hire for a part-time workload, who then fills the remaining time with activity that looks like marketing.
How many different skills does it need? One channel, one skill — hire or use a freelancer. Five channels needing genuinely different expertise — that's where a team starts making sense.
How much of your own time can you give it? In-house and freelancers both need managing. If you have no management capacity, you need a route that comes with its own project management, or the work will drift regardless of who's doing it.
What happens if this person leaves? If the answer is "everything stops", you've concentrated a lot of risk in one person. That's survivable, but it should be a decision you made deliberately rather than one you discover.
The comparison that actually matters
All of this is a cost conversation, and cost is only half of it. A cheaper route that produces nothing is infinitely more expensive than a pricier one that brings in customers. The real question isn't which line item is smallest — it's which route is most likely to produce work that grows the business, given your stage, your budget and how much of your own attention you can realistically spare.
Answer that honestly and the cost comparison usually resolves itself.
Related reading: see how agencies structure their fees and our guide to what a marketing agency costs in Sydney.
Not sure which route fits your stage? Tell us what you're trying to achieve — if the honest answer is that you should hire rather than engage us, we'll say so. See our packages.