On this page
- The naive crossover is eight posts a month, and it is wrong
- Correction one: your briefing hours belong in the unit price
- Correction two: rejected drafts move the true unit cost
- Per post pricing buys words and quietly buys out the thinking
- The Personeur Crossover Test, in five lines
- What a per post agreement must say before you sign it
- Which structure fits which situation
- The hybrid that beats both structures for most buyers
Divide the retainer by the per piece price and you get a crossover of roughly eight posts a month, which is wrong. Two corrections move it. Per post pricing pushes the briefing work back onto you, and rejected drafts raise your true unit cost. Price both in and the crossover lands between one and two posts a week for most buyers, far below where the naive division puts it.
The naive crossover is eight posts a month, and it is wrong
Take a per piece price of 250 dollars and a retainer of 2,000 dollars covering eight drafts, both stated here as assumptions rather than market rates. Divide one by the other and the retainer wins at eight posts a month. That is the calculation most buyers do in their head, and it flatters per post pricing, because it compares a fee against a fee and ignores everything else the two structures do differently.
Two corrections change the answer. The first is that per piece work pushes briefing back onto you, so every unit consumes your time as well as your money. The second is that rejected drafts are paid for under one structure and absorbed under the other. Neither correction is small, and both of them move the crossover in the same direction, downward.
87% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn, so the reader you want is being written at by your competitors on the same day you publish. That is the reason volume enters the pricing question at all, and the reason a decision about structure is really a decision about sustainable cadence.
Statista, 2026Correction one: your briefing hours belong in the unit price
A per piece writer starts each job cold and needs a brief. A retainer writer holds your context between jobs and gets the brief from a recurring conversation they are already being paid for. The difference lands on your calendar, and it is around thirty minutes per piece for most buyers, spent on a voice note, a call or a written angle.
Add that time to the per piece price at whatever your hour is worth, and the crossover volume becomes the retainer divided by the corrected unit cost. Here is the same 2,000 dollar retainer against the same 250 dollar piece, with only your hourly value changing.
| Your hour is worth | True cost of one per post piece | Retainer wins above | Which is roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| 75 | 287 | 7.0 posts a month | 1.6 a week |
| 150 | 325 | 6.2 posts a month | 1.4 a week |
| 240 | 370 | 5.4 posts a month | 1.2 a week |
| 300 | 400 | 5.0 posts a month | 1.2 a week |
| 500 | 500 | 4.0 posts a month | 0.9 a week |
Illustrative arithmetic on stated assumptions: 250 per piece, 2,000 retainer, thirty minutes of your briefing time per piece. Replace any input and redo the division.
The pattern is the useful part. The more your time is worth, the earlier the retainer wins, because the retainer is partly a purchase of your attention back from the process. A founder billing at 500 an hour who posts weekly is already past the crossover and does not know it, because the invoice they compare is only half of what they are spending.
Correction two: rejected drafts move the true unit cost
Your real unit cost is the price divided by the share of drafts you publish, and the two structures handle that division differently. Under a retainer, a rejected draft consumes capacity that month and costs you no extra cash. Under per piece work, it depends entirely on a clause most agreements do not contain.
Run the arithmetic. At 250 a piece with every draft paid for and three drafts in four published, the true unit cost is 333. At two in three it is 375. That is a bigger swing than most people negotiate over, and it is invisible until the month it happens.
| Contract shape | Who absorbs a rejected draft | The behaviour it produces |
|---|---|---|
| Per piece, payment on delivery | You do, in full | The writer is paid whether or not the work lands, so nothing in the structure rewards accuracy about your voice |
| Per piece, payment on acceptance | The writer does | Rejection risk gets priced into the unit or written out of the draft. Safe, generic, unobjectionable posts are the rational response to being unpaid for a rejected one |
| Per piece with a kill fee, commonly half | Split | The only version that survives a bad month without either side feeling robbed, which is why it is the clause worth insisting on |
| Retainer with a draft cap | You do, in capacity | Rejection is free in cash and expensive in output, so both sides have a reason to agree the angle before drafting rather than after |
| Retainer with unlimited revisions | The writer does, invisibly | Revision volume gets managed by writing to the middle. Unlimited revisions usually means nobody is defending a position |
Four ways an agreement can treat a rejected draft, and the behaviour each one produces on the other side of the table.
Notice that no shape in that table is dishonest. Each one simply distributes the cost of being wrong, and each distribution produces a predictable behaviour. Choose the distribution you can live with rather than the lowest headline number, and read the red flags that end a conversation early before you sign anything with no rejection clause at all.
Per post pricing buys words and quietly buys out the thinking
A unit price rewards the writer for spending less time per unit, and the first thing that gets compressed is always the input gathering, because it is the part you cannot see in the delivered file. That is not cynicism about writers, it is what any rational person does when paid per output and not per hour.
The consequence is specific. Drafts drift toward material that is already public, which means your own old posts, your website and your company's announcements. Month one reads well. Month four reads like a slightly worse remix of month one, because no new material has entered the system since the day you signed.
- The interview goes first, because it costs the writer an hour and costs you nothing visible when it is missing.
- The calendar goes second, because sequencing only pays off across a quarter and a per piece writer is not booked for a quarter.
- Iteration goes third. Learning what your audience responds to requires someone watching every post, and nobody watches a post they were paid for three weeks ago.
- What survives is drafting, which is the visible deliverable and therefore the last thing anybody cuts.
This is why the cheaper unit price often produces the more expensive asset. You are not comparing two prices for the same thing. You are comparing a price for words against a price for words plus the machinery that keeps the words connected to what you actually think.
- The naive crossover, retainer divided by per piece price, ignores your briefing hours and your rejection rate, and both of them push the crossover down.
- Once your own time is worth 150 dollars an hour or more, the retainer starts winning at around six posts a month rather than eight, and the number keeps falling as your hourly value rises.
- Per post pricing buys words and structurally excludes the interview, the calendar and the iteration, because a unit price rewards the writer for spending less time on each unit.
- The rejection clause is the most important line in a per post agreement and it is usually missing, which leaves both sides guessing in the month it matters.
- A paid one off voice build followed by a per piece rate beats both structures for buyers whose volume is genuinely low and whose standards are not.
The Personeur Crossover Test, in five lines
Volume is only one of five lines that decide the structure, and it is the one everybody checks first. Run all five before deciding, because a buyer can be below the volume crossover and still need a retainer for reasons three, four or five.
The test is deliberately not weighted, because the weights are personal. A consultant with a settled position and one post a week can rationally run per piece for years. A founder whose company changed direction twice in a year cannot, at any volume, because the memory line alone decides it.
What a per post agreement must say before you sign it
Per piece work fails on ambiguity rather than on price. Six lines remove almost all of it, and none of them are unusual asks.
- What one unit contains: a stated word range, the number of revision rounds included, and whether a rewritten angle counts as a revision or a new unit.
- The rejection clause, naming a kill fee or its absence in plain words rather than leaving it to the first bad month.
- Who supplies the brief and in what form, with an example attached to the agreement so both sides have seen what good input looks like.
- A response window on both sides, so a draft cannot sit for three weeks and a revision cannot sit for two.
- Ownership of the copy on payment, and ownership of the voice notes, transcripts and any voice document produced along the way.
- A minimum monthly commitment or an explicit statement that there is none, because an unstated expectation of steady volume is how per piece relationships quietly end.
The revision definition in line one causes more disputes than everything else combined. Changing the argument is not a revision, it is a new brief, and treating it as a revision is how a fair per piece rate becomes an unfair one for the writer. Say so in advance and you will get better drafts, because the writer stops defending against the possibility.
Which structure fits which situation
Match the structure to the constraint that is actually binding on you. Most buyers pick on price and then discover the binding constraint was time, approval speed or continuity.
| Your situation | Structure | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One or two posts a month, settled position, you brief comfortably | Per piece | You are below every version of the crossover and you already supply the expensive input |
| Weekly or more, and you dislike briefing | Retainer | Your briefing hours alone push you past the crossover, and the retainer buys them back |
| A launch, a funding round or a conference in eight weeks | Fixed project fee, not either | A finite campaign with a deadline is a project. A retainer for a project underdelivers before it and overcharges after it |
| Your position is changing as the company changes | Retainer | The memory line decides it. Per piece work restarts cold each time and will keep describing the company you were last quarter |
| You want to test a writer before committing | Two paid pieces, then decide | A paid trial priced per piece is the cheapest honest test of fit, and it is a normal request that a good writer will welcome |
| Compliance or investor review sits on every post | Retainer with a draft cap | Reviewed work has a low publish rate by design, and per piece pricing makes every legal hold a billing argument |
The situation on the left decides the structure, not the headline price.
The trial row is worth taking seriously. Two paid pieces tell you more than any portfolio, particularly if you also ask the questions that score a writer's process on the same call, because the combination shows you both the output and the machinery behind it.
The hybrid that beats both structures for most buyers
The structure that fits the most people is neither of the two on offer. Buy the thinking once as a fixed price project, then buy the words per piece at a lower unit rate. The expensive input gets paid for properly and the cheap input stays flexible.
A recorded interview of an hour or two, a written voice document listing your positions, your recurring examples and the words you would never say, and three sample pieces built from that material. It is a defined deliverable with a defined price, and you keep it whoever writes for you next.
The unit rate should now be lower than a cold per piece rate, because the writer is no longer starting from nothing. If the writer will not lower it, ask what the voice build was for.
A small minimum, two pieces for example, keeps you in the writer's calendar and keeps the context warm without committing you to output you will not publish.
Count drafts delivered against posts published. If the publish rate is climbing, the voice document is working. If it is flat, the interview never really happened and no structure will rescue it.
One warning about the hybrid. It only works if the voice document is genuinely yours to keep, in a file you can hand to someone else. If it lives in the writer's head or in their private tooling, you have bought a retainer with extra steps and a worse exit. Craft questions such as how a post should end if you want replies belong in that document too, because they are decisions about your voice rather than one off choices for one post.
Questions people ask next
Is per post pricing ever better than a retainer at high volume?
What is a fair kill fee for a rejected draft?
Should I pay a retainer in a month when I publish nothing?
How many revisions should one piece include?
Can I move from a retainer to per piece pricing later?
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