What a company blog actually costs, honestly compared

Every quote you get for a company blog prices the writing. Writing is the cheapest part and the part least likely to go wrong. The cost that actually determines whether the blog exists in a year is never on the invoice.

Here is the honest comparison, including our own option, with the parts vendors normally leave out.

The freelancer

A competent freelance writer in Northern Europe runs somewhere between two hundred and six hundred euros for a researched thousand-word post, depending on how technical the subject is and how much they have to learn about your business.

At four posts a month that is roughly eight hundred to two thousand four hundred euros. The writing is usually good. Freelancers are, on average, better writers than agencies.

What the number omits is that a freelancer needs briefing, and briefing is your time. Realistically half an hour per post to explain the subject, plus a review cycle, plus the periodic re-explaining when they misunderstand your product. Freelancers also churn — they take a full-time job, they raise rates, they go quiet in August — and each replacement costs you the ramp-up again from zero.

The agency

Agencies quote two to six thousand a month for a content retainer, and the number buys coordination as much as writing. You get a plan, a calendar, a report, and someone whose job is to chase you.

That coordination is real value, and it is why agencies survive. The trade is that the writing is usually done by whoever is available, the strategy deck is largely the same one the last client got, and the account manager who understood your business is reassigned in month seven. You are also paying for the agency's own overheads, which is most of the difference between their price and the freelancer's.

In-house

This looks free and is the most expensive option by a distance.

A marketing manager producing four posts a month is spending perhaps a day and a half a month writing, plus the diffuse cost of thinking about it the rest of the time. At a loaded salary of sixty thousand, that is meaningful money — but the real cost is opportunity. The posts get written instead of something else, and the something else was usually more valuable.

Then it stops. Not from incompetence, but because a quarter arrives with a launch in it. We have written at length about why this happens, and it is the single most common outcome we see.

The engine

We charge from a hundred and ninety-nine euros a month for four to six posts, rising with cadence and scope. That is deliberately below the freelance rate, because the marginal cost of a post is genuinely lower and pretending otherwise would be strange.

What that does not buy is a strategy department, an account manager to chase you, or somebody who will sit in your quarterly planning meeting. If those things are what you actually need, an agency is the right answer and we will say so.

What it does buy is that the fifty-second post gets published on the same schedule as the fourth, in the same voice, without anyone remembering to make it happen.

The cost every option shares

Approval. Somebody at your company has to read the post and decide it is true.

Nobody quotes this, and it is the only line item present in all four options. It is about ten minutes per post — less than most people expect, because the failure modes are factual and specific rather than stylistic. It cannot be delegated to the vendor, because the vendor does not know what you have promised a customer or what your lawyer said in March.

A vendor who tells you their process needs zero time from you is either lying or planning to publish things you would not have approved.

How to actually choose

If you have a genuine writer on staff who wants to write, keep them and give them the calendar. Nothing beats that, and no engine will.

If you need strategy, positioning work, and a person to argue with, hire an agency and accept the price.

If what you need is that a good post goes out every week for the next three years, in your voice, without becoming somebody's second job — that is the narrow thing we are for, and the reason our price starts where it does is that it is a narrow thing.