How much does a marketing agency cost?

The two figures actually worth quoting

Clutch, which aggregates pricing data from more than 100,000 companies, reports digital marketing retainers ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 per month, with $10,000 to $49,999 the typical band across the engagements it reviews. Backlinko's survey of more than 300 SEO professionals lands lower, putting average SEO retainers at $1,000 to $2,500 per month.

Those two numbers do not contradict each other. They measure different things. The first covers full-service digital marketing across every industry and company size. The second covers one discipline, priced on its own.

What nobody has actually measured

There is no credible survey of what B2B SaaS companies specifically pay marketing agencies. Not from Clutch, not from an analyst firm, not from an independent researcher. If such a study exists, we have not found it, and we looked.

You will still find dozens of pages stating a confident B2B SaaS average. Follow the citation chain on any of them. It ends at an agency's own pricing page, or at a content site quoting another content site quoting an agency's pricing page. Nobody surveyed anybody. Somebody's list price got repeated until it looked like research.

That matters when you are budgeting, because you are not comparing yourself against a market. You are comparing yourself against whatever one seller decided to publish.

How the fee is structured changes what you get

The pricing model tells you more about the incentives than the number does.

The four things that move the price most

Scope breadth. One channel run properly costs a fraction of five channels run at once, and usually works better at this stage.

Seniority of the people who touch the work. This is the single largest input into any agency's cost base, and the one most obscured during the pitch.

Whether execution is included or only strategy. A strategy deck is cheaper than someone posting, replying, and following up every day, because the second one is labour that cannot be batched.

Cadence. Four posts a month and twenty posts a month are different businesses, not different tiers of the same one.

What the fee does not cover

Advertising spend is separate almost everywhere. So are tools, video and design production, paid placements, sponsorships, and freelancers brought in for specialist work. Two quotes that look $4,000 apart can be identical once these land, or twice as far apart. Ask for the all-in number before comparing anything.

The question that price-checks a quote

Ask how many hours per week are allocated to your account, who fills them by name, and what ships in the first thirty days.

That converts an abstract fee into people and output, which is the only comparison that holds across two very different proposals. Agencies with a real staffing plan answer it immediately. Agencies selling availability change the subject to strategy.

Zway does not publish a price, because scope varies too much for a list price to mean anything. It is quoted on the call, against the specific channels and cadence you need.