Service
Social media management pricing, by posts and channels
Social media management pricing starts at $400/mo: twelve, twenty-four or forty-eight posts a month across a stated number of channels, with the exclusions written on every tier.
In one line
Social media management, from $400/mo, is the planning, production and scheduling of posts on your existing channels. Social media management pricing here rests on two counts, posts per month and channels covered, with paid budget, community management and video production stated as exclusions rather than assumed.
Social media management pricing, tier by tier
Starter
12 posts/mo, 2 channels
$333/mo billed yearly
- 12 posts
- 2 channels
- Scheduling handled
- Monthly performance summary
- Not included: Paid social budget
- Not included: Community management / DM replies
- Not included: Video production
Growth
24 posts/mo, 4 channels
$708/mo billed yearly
- 24 posts
- 4 channels
- Everything in Starter
- Custom graphics
- Comment monitoring
- Not included: Paid social budget
- Not included: Video production
Scale
48 posts/mo, all channels
$1,583/mo billed yearly
- 48 posts
- All major channels
- Everything in Growth
- Short-form video editing
- Quarterly strategy review
- Not included: Paid social budget
These social media management are billed at the price shown, with no scoping call in the way. First content calendar within 7 business days.
Every tier is billed monthly, and the scope is fixed by a brief you agree before anything is invoiced.
Page one is a mix of agency pricing pages and a Reddit thread of practitioners arguing about what a package should include. The Reddit thread is more specific than most of the agency pages, which is a fair summary of this market.
What the price buys at each tier
Which tier you actually need
Two counts set the tier: posts per month and channels covered. Both matter, because the same post cross-published to six channels is not six posts.
All three social media management run the same process and the same reporting. What changes between them is volume.
Starter
A business with two channels that actually have an audience, wanting consistency rather than volume.
You are on this tier when: Your posting has become sporadic and the gap between posts is measured in weeks.
Growth
Four channels with different formats, where custom graphics and comment monitoring have become necessary.
You are on this tier when: Comments are going unanswered, or you are reusing the same image across channels that need different ratios.
Scale
All major channels at pace, including short-form video editing from footage you already have.
You are on this tier when: Video is where your audience is, and the editing queue is the bottleneck.
Three exclusions that cause most of the disappointment
Short answer
Paid social budget is excluded at every tier. DM and comment replies are excluded at Starter. Video production is excluded until Scale.
Those three are what buyers most often assume is included in a social retainer, so they are printed on the tier.
A package that quietly excludes community management fails in week two, when someone asks a question in the comments and nobody answers it.
Comment monitoring starts at Growth, which is different from full community management, and the difference is written down rather than left to interpretation.
Reach comes from something called a content graph or an interest graph and not a follower graph.
Why this matters
How a month actually runs
Order, brief, production, delivery, report. The same four steps every month, so a second month can be compared against a first.
- 1
Days 1 to 7
First calendar
A month of planned posts, produced within 7 business days of the brief, for you to approve.
- 2
Ongoing
Production and scheduling
Posts written and scheduled to the calendar. Changes before publication are free and expected.
- 3
From Growth
Comment monitoring
Comments watched and flagged, with responses drafted for you where a reply is needed.
- 4
Month end
Performance summary
What performed, what did not, and what the next calendar changes as a result.
Reach without revenue is just a vanity metric.
Why this matters
A typical social retainer
- Price
- Quoted per client
- Output
- "Regular posting"
- Channels
- Unstated
- Ad budget
- Sometimes blended into the fee
- Approval
- Posts go out and you see them live
The Super Panel
- Price
- Published, by post and channel count
- Output
- 12, 24 or 48 posts a month
- Channels
- 2, 4, or all major channels
- Ad budget
- Excluded, and stated on every tier
- Approval
- Calendar approved before anything publishes
How much does social media management cost is answered on the cards above: $400/mo at Starter for two channels, usually Facebook and Instagram, with LinkedIn or a third added at Growth. The Small Business Administration publishes no benchmark for it.
Two numbers get quoted at us more than any others: engagement rate, and follower growth. Neither is a deliverable anybody can sell, which is why this is a monthly retainer against a counted output instead.
Scheduling tools such as Cloud Campaign price per client account and sit underneath a good share of this market. Formats are counted the same way whatever the tool: an Instagram Reels post counts as one post, the same as a static one.
The three things buyers ask before ordering
Social is the service where the exclusions matter most, so the questions about them get direct answers.
Will this bring in sales?
Organic social rarely drives direct sales inside a quarter. It holds attention, supports search discovery, and gives an audience somewhere to check you are real.
Why is community management not included?
Because it is a staffing commitment rather than a production task. Comment monitoring from Growth flags what needs a reply and drafts it. Someone answering messages all day is a different product and pretending otherwise is how retainers fail in week two.
Can you grow our follower count?
No promise on that. Follower growth depends on your offer and audience far more than posting cadence, and any guaranteed number in this market is bought followers.
Why these social media marketing packages cost less, stated plainly
The published guides agree on what drives the cost of a social retainer: strategy depth, content production, community management, paid media and reporting depth.
Three of those five are removed from the Starter tier by design, and each removal is printed on the tier. That is a different thing from selling the same work for less.
Nothing here claims to match a $3,000 retainer at $400. Exclusions listed on the tier are the whole mechanism: you can see which parts are missing before you buy.
No guide in the top ten does that.
Cost per post, worked out
Short answer
Divide each tier by its post count and the unit price is roughly $33 a post at Starter, $35 at Growth and $40 at Scale. The number rises as the tier rises, because each tier adds work to every post rather than discounting volume.
No page in the top ten publishes a per-post figure, which is odd, because it is the only number that makes two quotes directly comparable.
It is also the number that exposes a vague quote fastest. A retainer with no stated post count has no unit price at all.
Paid social is excluded, and here is what that means
Short answer
Advertising budget is never inside the fee at any tier. Organic posting and paid distribution solve different problems, and buying one while expecting the other is the most expensive mistake available on this page.
Organic posting earns reach post by post. Paid distribution buys it.
A social retainer that quietly includes some boosting is spending your money without a stated budget line, and it reports the result as reach rather than as spend.
If distribution is what you actually need, managed paid campaigns are priced separately.
The fees that are not on this page because they do not exist
No onboarding fee. No setup fee. No per-channel surcharge.
Competitor onboarding fees are commonly quoted in the low four figures, covering an audit and brand-voice work before any post is published.
The only number here is the monthly one, which is rather the point of publishing it.
What you have to supply
Short answer
Brand assets, any product photography you want used, and one named person who can approve a calendar. Approval speed is the single commonest cause of a slow month, and no tier fixes it.
Where approvals stall, the calendar moves rather than the posts being lost. Nothing is silently dropped to hit a count.
- Logo files and brand colours
- Product or premises photography, if you want your own imagery used
- One named approver who can say yes
- Anything regulated that must not be said
A disclosure you have to click is not a disclosure
Section 465.1(c)(4) of the FTC reviews rule defines clear and conspicuous for interactive media, and the definition rules out most of what this industry does.
A disclosure is not clear and conspicuous if the consumer must take any action to see it. That includes clicking a hyperlink and hovering over an icon. The linked disclosure page, the asterisk, the tooltip and the policy in the footer all fail it.
For paid social advertising and for anything a creator posts on your behalf, that is a content approval question before it is a legal one.
ying engagement is the violation, not just selling it">Growth packages still sell followers and engagement, the way AI visibility gets sold, and the assumption is that any risk sits with the panel supplying them. Section 465.8 says otherwise.
Purchasing or procuring fake indicators of social media influence, where they are known or should have been known to be fake and they materially misrepresent influence for a commercial purpose, is itself a violation. The buyer is named alongside the seller.
Section 465.1(h) defines fake broadly: metrics generated by bots, by accounts not associated with a real individual, by accounts made with someone’s details without consent, or by hijacked accounts. That covers most of what is sold as growth.
Which is the honest answer to how many posts per month should i get, and to what does a social media service actually deliver. A counted number of posts, reels and tiktoks included, is a deliverable. An audience number is not one anybody can sell you.
It is also the answer to why do social media agencies hide their prices. Spec sheet pricing forces a deliverable checklist, and a checklist is what scope creep argues against later.
So the order here is a brief before invoice, a one business day reply, and a named social media manager coordinating the work. Yearly billing is 10 months charged rather than a discount badge, for the same reason.
What this does not say: The definition governs disclosures required by part 465. Other disclosure regimes define clear and conspicuous differently and are not covered here.
| eCFR, 16 CFR part 465 - Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, current codified text | read 2026-09-06 |
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How billing works, and what cancelling changes
Short answer
Retainers are billed monthly in advance. There is no minimum contract and no notice period, so cancelling stops the next renewal rather than triggering a claw-back. Work already in production for the current month still ships.
Cancelling does not pro-rate the month already begun, because that month of deliverables is still completed.
What ends is access, not ownership. Content is yours on delivery, and the accounts were always in your name.
The same policy is set out in what cancelling Social Media means in the terms.
When a social package will not help
Short answer
Posting on a schedule does nothing for a business with no audience on those channels, no product story to tell, or an expectation that organic social will drive direct sales this quarter. Paid social answers that question, and its budget is excluded here.
- You expect organic social to generate direct sales inside a quarter.
- You want someone answering DMs all day. Community management is excluded at Starter.
- You need original video shot and edited. Video editing starts at Scale.
- Your audience is not on the channels you already run. Posting more will not move them.
Questions before you order
This is built for a small business owner, a business with no content person, or a team without a designer. A social media specialist, a content creator and a community manager are all inside the tier price rather than sold as a dedicated account manager.
Production runs through a vetted vendor, and a white label vendor is never resold to you as staff.
If the platforms you need are not the ones listed, name them before you order. We would rather decline a channel than staff it badly and bill for it monthly.
What is a fair price for social media management for a small business?
Fair is a price you can check against a count. The SBA publishes no benchmark and market rates run from a few hundred dollars a month to several thousand, while Sprout Social pricing covers the tool rather than the labour. Here the entry tier is $400/mo for 12 posts across 2 channels.
How much does 12 posts a month cost, and is cheap social media management worth it?
12 posts a month is the Starter tier at $400/mo, about $33 a post. Below that level something gives, usually the writing or the approval step. What does a social media package include is the better question: a counted number of posts, a calendar you approve, and a monthly summary.
Who owns the content a social media agency makes, and what happens if I cancel my social media retainer?
You do, on delivery rather than at the end of the engagement. Cancelling stops work at the end of the month you cancel in, that month is not pro-rated because its posts are still produced, and you keep everything already delivered along with the accounts it was published to.
How much is social media management for a small business, per month?
Starter is $400/mo for 12 posts across 2 channels, Growth is $850/mo for 24 posts across 4, and Scale is $1,900/mo for 48 posts across all major channels. Those are the whole fee, with no onboarding charge on top.
Does social media management include paid ads, or is ad spend separate?
No. Paid social budget is excluded at every tier and paid to the platform by you directly, so nothing about your spend passes through us.
Why does the cost per post go up on the bigger package?
Because each tier adds work to every post rather than discounting volume. Growth adds custom graphics and comment monitoring, Scale adds short-form video editing. Roughly $33 a post at Starter becomes about $35 at Growth and $40 at Scale.
Is there a minimum contract for social media management, and what is the notice period?
Neither. Billing is monthly and there is no minimum term and no notice period, so cancelling stops the next renewal. Work already in production for the current month still ships.
Do social media agencies charge an onboarding fee? This one does not.
No. There is no onboarding fee, no setup fee and no per-channel surcharge. The monthly figure on the tier is the only number.
How soon does the first content calendar arrive?
Within 7 business days of the brief being agreed. Publishing starts once you have approved that calendar, not before.
Who owns the posts and graphics after they are delivered?
You do, on delivery rather than for as long as you keep paying. The channels were always in your name, and cancelling ends our access, not your ownership.
Sources cited on this page
- Meta’s branded content policies – Cited for platform-rule constraints on published content.
Start Social Media from $400/mo
Pick a tier and send the order. You get a brief form and a start date within one business day, and nothing is charged until that brief is agreed.
Entry point $300/mo. Cancel any time. No long contracts.
Still deciding?
Read how the process runs end to end: order, brief, production, delivery, report.
How it worksSources
| The FTC's Endorsement Guides: what people are asking | US Federal Trade Commission, read 2026-09-06 |
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| The Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: questions and answers (16 CFR part 465, in force 21 October 2024) | US Federal Trade Commission, read 2026-09-06 |
Each link was opened on the date shown. Where a figure is illustrative rather than measured, the page says so beside it.