In-house vs Propria
Six salaries, eleven tools, or one subscription.
Put your own figures in below and see what that costs against one managed subscription.
Costs and estimates are illustrative, based on average salaries. Every firm's market is different, which is what the strategy call is for.
Beyond the payroll
The salary is the smallest part of the bill.
The calculator counts what you can see on a spreadsheet. These are the costs that only appear once the team is running.
Nine months to complete
Six specialist roles, hired sequentially, at eight to fourteen weeks each, then three to six months of ramp before anyone is producing at the level you hired them for. Demand doesn't wait for your org chart.
Every layer is a single point of failure
One resignation removes an entire capability. Your outreach stops when your SDR leaves; your search visibility decays quietly for a quarter while you recruit. A subscription doesn't hand in its notice.
Management is a job you take on
Six specialists need briefing, review, coordination, and appraisal. Most firms find that a partner or director absorbs a day a week, the most expensive hours in the business, spent on marketing admin.
Generalists in specialist seats
Below a certain budget, you don't hire six specialists; you hire two generalists and hope. The layers that need genuine depth, answer-engine optimisation and signal infrastructure especially are the ones that quietly never get built.
List price, one seat at a time
You buy each tool alone, at retail, on annual commitments, and pay for the integration work to make them talk to each other. We buy the same stack across a portfolio and maintain the joins once.
What you're actually buying
You're not hiring six people. You're building infrastructure.
Signal detection pipeline
Continuous monitoring of your named target accounts for hiring, funding, leadership change, expansion, technology adoption and public posting, deduplicated, scored for fit and routed to the right sequence with the right proof attached.
Answer-engine structuring
Schema markup, entity consistency across the web, and citable answer blocks written so that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews name your firm when a buyer asks who to speak to. A different discipline to ranking, and a narrow window to claim it.
CRM architecture
Lifecycle stages, properties, lead scoring, automated routing and speed-to-lead alerts are built so that every opportunity carries the layer that created it, and you can read which part of the system produced which pound of pipeline.
The content-to-asset pipeline
A completed matter triggers a case study; the case study becomes a website proof point, a landing-page testimonial, a citable page, a newsletter feature, a series of posts and the strongest line in the next outreach sequence. One asset, five jobs, repeatably.
Visitor identification
Anonymous traffic resolved to company records, matched against the ICP, and pushed into the CRM as a warm signal, so the firms researching you quietly become conversations rather than a line in an analytics report.
Deliverability infrastructure
Secondary sending domains, warmed mailboxes, SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured properly, rotation and volume pacing, with reputation monitored continuously. Get this wrong once and your outreach silently stops arriving.
Conversion testing
A landing page per segment and campaign, structured experiments on the headline, proof, and call to action, performance budgets, and Core Web Vitals held to a standard, so the site improves every month rather than every four years.
The reporting layer
One leading indicator per layer, reviewed monthly, against a single north star: qualified pipeline value produced by the system. Not impressions, not activity; the number a managing partner can take to a board.
A Word On Honesty
In-house is sometimes the right answer.
A calculator will always flatter whoever built it, so here is the honest version. Build the team yourself if marketing is genuinely your product, if you have the volume to keep six specialists fully occupied, or if you already have a senior marketing leader in post who can hire and hold the standard. In those cases, the economics change and the control is worth paying for.
For most professional firms, none of those is true. What they have is a partner doing marketing between matters, two suppliers who have never spoken, and a system that exists in pieces. A subscription is not cheaper because it is lesser; it is cheaper because the infrastructure is already built, the specialists are already hired, and the cost of both is shared.
And if you outgrow it, you own everything: the strategy document, the site, the content, the CRM, the case studies and the audience. Nothing about this is rented.
Bring your own numbers.
Send us the figure the calculator gave you, and we'll walk through it properly: what your firm already has, what's genuinely missing, and what the system would need to produce to be worth it.