Your agency invoices EUR 1,500 a month. What happens if you do it yourself?

This one is for you if you already pay for social media. An agency, a freelancer or a part-time hire. The invoice arrives every month, and at some point so does the thought: could I do this myself?

It's the right question, asked backwards. Not how much would I save, but what would I have to start doing. Only then can you tell whether it's worth it.

What the invoice actually covers

When an agency bills EUR 1,500 a month, the money doesn't go into pressing publish. That takes seconds. The single biggest item is content production, typically around EUR 75 an hour (Arctic Nexus). The rest splits four ways:

Two of those four are mechanical and two are not. Publishing, scheduling and distributing to several channels is repetition, and a machine does repetition better than a person. Tracking is pulling numbers into one view. Ideas and tone of voice are neither.

That split decides the whole question.

What moves to the tool, what stays with you

A publishing tool takes the two mechanical parts. You write once, pick the channels, schedule, and the platform handles the rest. Analytics land in one view instead of five logins.

What stays with you is the part nobody can do for you: what you talk about and how it sounds. AI writes the drafts, but a draft is a draft. You know what your customers care about and which words your business uses.

In hours that is about an hour a week. You sit down, go through the week's topics, approve and edit the drafts, schedule them in one go. For the rest of the week you don't touch social media.

The arithmetic

An agency at EUR 1,500 a month is EUR 18,000 a year. A publishing tool costs around EUR 19 a month, or EUR 228 a year. The gap is EUR 17,772, and in exchange you give up about four hours a month.

Value your own hour at EUR 60 and those four hours a month come to EUR 2,880 a year. So the comparison is roughly EUR 3,100 against EUR 18,000. Still almost six times apart.

This doesn't mean the agency overcharges. It means you are also buying the thinking, which you can do yourself if you want to.

When to keep the agency

Three situations where the answer is no.

Social media is a big part of sales. If a meaningful share of customers arrive through social, it's a sales channel, not a side task. Then a dedicated person is usually the sensible answer, and the median salary for a marketing coordinator in Finland is about EUR 3,470 a month (Työhakuapu, Duunitori), closer to EUR 4,500 once you count employer costs.

Not even that hour is there. If there realistically isn't one hour in the week, switching doesn't save money, it ends your social media. A silent account costs more than the invoice.

You need someone accountable. An agency has an obligation to deliver. If you don't want that responsibility yourself, that is a real reason to pay for it.

How to test it without cancelling anything

Don't end the contract first. It's an unnecessary risk, and it makes comparison impossible.

Run a tool alongside for one month. Handle one channel yourself while the agency handles the rest. After a month you have three answers: how long it actually took, whether it sounded like your business, and whether anyone watched.

Those three numbers tell you which way is right for you. You can't get them in advance, and not from reading this.

Steadybeat, the social media tool for people who run the business themselves.

Sources

Pricing verified in August 2026, and it is the same data as in the social media pricing guide, which compares all four ways side by side.

• Arctic Nexus, Somemarkkinoinnin hinta. Freelancer hourly rate EUR 80 to 150, content production around EUR 75 an hour.
• Työhakuapu and Duunitori, marketing coordinator salary. Median EUR 3,470 a month.
• Growly, the cost of Facebook and Instagram advertising. Starting budget EUR 300 to 500 a month in media spend.

These are Finnish market rates. There is no public statistic for them, so the figures come from the price guides agencies publish themselves. They are sellers describing their own market, not independent tracking. Treat them as an order of magnitude and always ask for a quote.