On this page
- The monthly fee prices drafts, and you do not publish drafts
- Work out your loaded cost per published post in four lines
- Your own hourly value is the input that flips the answer
- The five things a ghostwriting price is actually made of
- Read your tier from your own inputs, not from the package name
- What the fee cannot buy, at any tier
- The publish rate is the line nobody quotes, and it is mostly yours
- When the honest answer is that you should not hire anyone yet
Published ghostwriting ranges are useless on their own because they price drafts, not published posts. Work out the loaded cost per published post instead: the fee, plus your own hours valued at a rate you choose, divided by the posts that actually go live after rejections and legal holds. Then read your tier from your own inputs, chiefly how much raw material you generate and how fast you approve.
The monthly fee prices drafts, and you do not publish drafts
Two arrangements quoting the same monthly number can differ by three times on the only figure that decides anything, which is what you paid for each post that actually reached an audience. A fee buys drafts. Some of those drafts die in your inbox, some die in legal review, and some die because you changed your mind about the argument. The survivors are the product.
Every page that ranks for this question hands over a range and stops there. The ranges disagree with each other, none of them states a sample or a scope, and all of them are published by people who sell the service. That is not a scandal, it is just a reason to treat every published band as a description of one seller's packaging rather than a market rate.
At least one widely cited pricing page converts a monthly fee into a cost per lead by assuming a close rate and never sourcing it. A close rate you did not measure in your own pipeline turns the arithmetic into decoration. If you want a cost per lead, take your own closed deals from the last four quarters and divide. Everything below stays on ground you can verify yourself.
76% call LinkedIn the most effective channel for thought leadership, which is why executive writing carries agency pricing rather than freelance copywriting pricing. You are buying into the channel's competition, not just the words.
Content Marketing Institute, cited 2026Work out your loaded cost per published post in four lines
Four lines give you a number you can compare across every option, including doing nothing. The method is arithmetic on assumptions you state out loud, so nobody has to trust a survey.
- The fee. Whatever the arrangement costs you in a month, before anything else is counted.
- Your hours. Interview time, reading drafts, rewriting the parts you disagree with, chasing approvals. Count them honestly, then value them at a rate you choose.
- The publish rate. Drafts delivered, minus the ones you reject, minus the ones held for legal or timing. This is the number sellers never quote and buyers never track.
- Divide. Fee plus valued hours, divided by posts published. That is your loaded cost per published post.
The table below runs three options through those four lines. Every input is an assumption, marked as such, and every one of them is yours to replace. The value of your own hour is set at 150 dollars purely to make the arithmetic visible.
| Line | You write it yourself | Freelancer working from your briefs | Interview led monthly retainer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee (assumed) | 0 | 1,200 | 3,000 |
| Drafts you receive | None, you write them | 8 | 12 |
| Posts actually published (assumed) | 4 | 6 | 9 |
| Your hours per month (assumed) | 6.0 | 4.0 | 4.5 |
| Your hours valued at 150 an hour | 900 | 600 | 675 |
| Loaded monthly cost | 900 | 1,800 | 3,675 |
| Loaded cost per published post | 225 | 300 | 408 |
Illustrative arithmetic. All inputs are stated assumptions, not survey data. Replace them with your own and redo the division.
Read the last row and the retainer looks like the worst deal on the page. Read it beside the publish row and the picture changes, because the retainer produced nine posts and writing it yourself produced four. The honest comparison is marginal: moving from four posts to nine costs an extra 2,775 dollars for five extra posts, which is 555 dollars per additional post. Now the question is answerable. Are posts five through nine worth 555 each to you, in the year they run?
Your own hourly value is the input that flips the answer
Writing it yourself is the cheapest option per published post only while your time is cheap. Hold every other assumption from the table above and change one input, the value of your hour, and the ranking inverts twice.
| Your hour is worth | Write it yourself | Freelancer on your briefs | Monthly retainer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 75 | 112 | 250 | 371 |
| 150 | 225 | 300 | 408 |
| 240 | 360 | 360 | 453 |
| 333 | 500 | 422 | 500 |
| 500 | 750 | 533 | 583 |
The same three options, with only the value of your own hour changed. Loaded cost per published post, rounded to whole dollars.
Two crossover points fall out of that table. At about 240 dollars an hour, the freelancer becomes cheaper per published post than writing it yourself. At about 333 dollars an hour, so does the full retainer, and it delivers more than twice the volume at the same unit cost. Below 240 an hour, doing it yourself genuinely is the rational choice on cost alone, and no seller will ever tell you that.
One caution about your own rate. Founders tend to either flatter themselves with a rate borrowed from their billing sheet or dismiss the question entirely. Use a rate you would actually pay someone else to take an hour of this work off you. If you would not pay it, you do not believe it.
The five things a ghostwriting price is actually made of
A quote either contains these five things or it does not. Four of them are invisible in the finished post, which is exactly why cheap arrangements cut them, and why the cut is undetectable until month three.
The interview hour is the line most often cut, because its absence is invisible in the delivered file. A post written without any new input from you is a post assembled from things you already published, which is why month four of a cheap arrangement reads like a slightly worse version of month one.
- The monthly fee prices drafts, and you do not publish drafts, so divide every quote by the posts you expect to actually publish rather than the posts you expect to receive.
- Your own hours belong in the comparison, and they are usually the line that decides it, because doing it yourself is only cheap if your time is cheap.
- Under the worked assumptions in this piece, writing it yourself stops being the cheapest option per published post once your own time is worth roughly 240 to 333 dollars an hour.
- The tier you belong in is set by how much raw material you already generate and how fast you approve, not by the size of your company.
- A low publish rate is usually caused by the buyer's approval behaviour rather than the writer's drafting, and the contract can fix it in two clauses.
Read your tier from your own inputs, not from the package name
Your tier is set by two things: how much original raw material you generate each week, and how fast you make decisions about it. Company size, funding stage and follower count have nothing to do with it. A solo consultant who spends thirty hours a week in customer conversations belongs in a higher tier than a Series B founder who spends the week in a board pack.
| If this describes you | The tier that fits | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|---|
| You already write, you have a clear view, you simply run out of Thursdays | Drafting | Execution hours against a brief you supply. The thinking stays with you, so the price should be the lowest of any arrangement and so should your expectations of strategy |
| The material is in your head and none of it is on paper | Extraction | A recurring interview and a transcript discipline. You are paying for the questions asked of you, not for the sentences |
| You have plenty of material and no judgement about which parts are worth publishing | Editorial ownership | Someone senior enough to tell you that the story you like best is the weakest one, and a calendar they will defend when you want to skip a week |
| Every post carries legal, investor or customer risk | Reviewed production | A slower process with an approval trail, a fact check step, and one named person accountable for every claim in the copy |
| Three executives need to sound like themselves and not like each other | Programme | Separate voice files, a shared calendar, and someone whose job is stopping three people publishing the same idea in one week |
| You post twice a year around funding news | No retainer at all | Project work priced per piece. A monthly fee against a quarterly need is a subscription to guilt |
Match the arrangement to your own inputs. The left column is the diagnosis and the right column is what the money is genuinely buying.
Buying above your tier wastes money in a specific and predictable way. You pay for extraction interviews you cancel, then resent the invoice. Buying below your tier wastes all of it, because the drafts arrive built from public material you already published, and you end up rewriting them yourself at a rate of two hours each.
What the fee cannot buy, at any tier
Three things stay outside the contract no matter what you spend, and every honest seller will say so before you ask.
- Reach. Nobody controls distribution on a platform whose ranking they do not operate. A promised number of impressions is a statement about the seller's confidence, not about your outcome.
- A point of view you do not hold. A writer can find, sharpen and stage an opinion that is genuinely yours. A writer who manufactures one produces posts you quietly stop defending in meetings, which is worse than silence.
- Your approval speed. The best draft in the world sits unpublished if it needs three signatures and you are the third. This is the input buyers most often blame on the writer.
A fourth thing is worth naming because it is priced as though it were included. Craft at the sentence level, the part that decides whether anyone reads past line one, is a specific skill and not a tier. Some very expensive arrangements deliver strategically sound posts nobody finishes. If the openings are what you are missing, that is a craft problem, treated properly in how a hook earns its first 140 characters.
The publish rate is the line nobody quotes, and it is mostly yours
A 3,000 dollar retainer at twelve drafts is 250 dollars a draft. At a publish rate of nine in twelve it is 333 dollars a post. At six in twelve it is 500. Nothing about the writing changed between those three numbers. What changed was how many drafts made it out of your inbox.
Track the reason for every unpublished draft for one month and the cause almost always turns out to be structural rather than editorial. The idea was never agreed before drafting began. The approver was travelling. The subject stopped being true between the interview and the delivery. All three are fixable in the arrangement rather than in the prose.
- The idea queue is approved before drafting starts, in writing, with a specific angle rather than a topic. Approving the topic and rejecting the angle is the single most common way a paid draft dies.
- A named approval window, commonly 48 hours, after which the draft publishes or is formally killed rather than drifting. Drift is what turns a draft into a sunk cost.
- One named approver. Two approvers means an average, and averaging two opinions about voice produces something neither of them would have written.
- A rule for what happens to a killed draft: reworked into the next slot, banked for later, or paid for and shelved. Decide once, in advance, not in the week it happens.
- A monthly count of drafts delivered against posts published, on the invoice. If it never appears, you will never know what you paid per post.
That last clause changes behaviour on both sides more than any other term in the agreement. It also settles the structural argument about whether to pay per piece or per month, which is worth reading before you sign either, in per post or a monthly retainer.
When the honest answer is that you should not hire anyone yet
Do not hire while the thing you want to be known for is still moving. A writer handed an unstable position will either invent a stable one for you, which you will resent by month two, or reflect your uncertainty back in better prose at a higher price.
- You can name the reader in a job title, not a category such as founders or decision makers.
- You can name three things you believe about your field that a competent competitor would argue with.
- You have at least one recurring source of fresh material, whether customer calls, product decisions or hiring, and you can point at where it is recorded.
- You know who approves a post and how quickly, and that person knows it too.
- You can say what a good month looks like in something other than impressions.
Four out of five settled means a writer will do good work at a modest price, because you have already supplied the expensive inputs. Fewer than three means you are buying an argument rather than a service, and the cheapest way to buy an argument is to pay for two hours of a senior editor's attention and no drafts at all. When you do get to the shortlist, the fastest way to sort it is the questions that reveal a real process, because a portfolio shows you finished posts without telling you which half the client wrote.
You are not buying words per month. You are buying the number of times a year a thing you actually believe reaches the person you need to reach, divided by what it cost to get it there.The house position
Questions people ask next
Is a cheaper LinkedIn ghostwriter always worse?
Should the first month cost more than the following months?
Do I have to pay separately for interview time?
How do I compare a per word price with a monthly retainer?
What is a fair price if I only want my own drafts edited?
How long should I commit to before judging the results?
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