We are an Amazon PPC agency, so treat the agency section below with appropriate suspicion. We have tried to write the comparison we would want to read if we were the ones hiring, which means being specific about where agencies are the wrong answer.
Start with the real question
Most people start with “what does it cost?” The more useful question is: what is the actual bottleneck in your account right now?
- Nobody has time. Campaigns are fine in principle, but nobody opens the console. Almost any option fixes this.
- Nobody knows what to do. A strategy gap, not a time gap. Hiring hours does not fix a knowledge problem.
- It worked and stopped working. Usually structural debt accumulated quietly. Needs diagnosis before management.
- You are scaling into new marketplaces. Breadth of experience matters more than hours.
Hiring the wrong shape of help for your bottleneck is the most common and most expensive mistake, and it is independent of price.
The freelancer
Typically Upwork or Fiverr, usually $300–$1,500 a month depending on experience and scope.
Genuinely good when your account is small to mid-sized, strategy is settled, and the work is execution: bid adjustments, negative keywords, routine reporting. A good freelancer at $600 a month will beat a mediocre agency at $2,500, and this happens more often than agencies admit.
The real risks:
- Single point of failure. They get ill, take a holiday or a better client, and your account stops being managed.
- Enormous variance in skill. The gap between best and worst at the same price is larger than almost any other category, and hard to assess before hiring.
- Usually one marketplace. Multi-market expertise is rare at this level.
- Execution, not diagnosis. Most freelancers do what you ask. If what you ask for is wrong, nobody catches it.
Ask what their breakeven ACoS calculation looks like for a product you describe. Anyone who answers with a generic target rather than asking about your margin, fees and conversion rate is managing to a number they have not thought about. Check their answer in our breakeven calculator.
The agency
Generally $1,500–$6,000 a month, or a percentage of ad spend, sometimes with a minimum commitment.
Genuinely good when something is broken and you do not know what. Diagnosis is what agencies are structurally better at, because they have seen the same failure patterns across many accounts. Also useful across several marketplaces, or when the account is large enough that a 15% ACoS improvement comfortably exceeds the fee.
The real risks:
- The handoff. Sold by someone senior, managed by someone junior. The most common complaint about agencies, and usually true.
- Percentage-of-spend conflicts. If the fee is a percentage of ad spend, the agency earns more when you spend more — a direct conflict with reducing wasted spend.
- Templated strategy. Large agencies apply one playbook because it scales. Not wrong, but not tailored.
- Too expensive below a certain size. On $5,000 a month of ad spend, a $2,500 fee is indefensible. Be suspicious of any agency willing to take that account.
Questions worth asking any agency, us included: who specifically touches my account day to day, is the fee tied to my ad spend, and what is the notice period.
The in-house hire
Realistically $45,000–$85,000 a year plus overhead for someone genuinely capable.
Genuinely good when advertising is core rather than supporting, spend justifies full-time attention, and you want the knowledge to stay in the company. Above roughly $80,000–$100,000 a month in ad spend, in-house usually wins on cost alone.
The real risks:
- You have to be able to assess them. Hiring a specialist in a discipline nobody internally understands is hard, and a bad hire costs far more than a bad agency.
- Isolation. One person inside one account stops seeing the wider market. This degrades quietly over a couple of years.
- Ramp time. Three to six months before full productivity.
- Key person risk. When they leave, the knowledge leaves.
A straight recommendation
| Monthly ad spend | Usually the right answer | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under $3,000 | Freelancer, or yourself | No fee structure justifies itself at this size. |
| $3,000–$15,000 | Freelancer or small agency | Depends whether your bottleneck is time or knowledge. |
| $15,000–$80,000 | Agency | Improvements are large enough to cover a fee several times over. |
| Over $80,000 | In-house, often with an agency audit | Full-time cost is lower than fees. |
Two things worth saying plainly. If you are under $3,000 a month in ad spend, you almost certainly do not need us, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. And whichever route you take, get a diagnosis before buying ongoing management — knowing what is actually wrong is what makes any of the three work.
That is the reasoning behind our free audit: it is the part that has to happen first regardless of who ends up doing the work.
Want a second pair of eyes before peak?
We will go through your campaigns, listings, keywords and account health and write up exactly what is costing you money. Free, and yours to keep either way.
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