SEO content cost calculator

What does a blog post
really cost?

What does a blog post really cost? Compare freelancers, agencies, in-house writers, AI tools and Balzac, per post and per month, with your own numbers.

Posts per month Your time, value per hour ($, assumption)

Freelance writer

Price per post ($, assumption) Your hours per post (brief, edit, publish)

Agency

Price per post ($, assumption) Your hours per post

In-house writer

Cost per writer per month ($, assumption) Posts one writer produces a month (assumption) Your hours per post

DIY with AI tools

AI tool subscriptions per month ($, assumption) Your hours per post (prompt, fact-check, edit, publish)

Balzac

Your hours per post (review, assumption)

Plans and prices are not editable: they are Balzac's current plans (Columnist $79/mo, about 30 articles; Novelist $99/mo, about 60 articles; Ghostwriter $179/mo, about 150 articles).

Route	Cash per post	Cash per month	Per post with your time	Per month with your time

This is a price comparison from the numbers above. It does not compare quality, rankings or traffic, and it ignores taxes, revisions, images and publishing tools unless you add them to your prices.

Free, no account, nothing leaves your browser. Prices marked as assumptions are editable placeholders, not market statistics.

How to use it

1
Set how many posts you want
Posts per month is the one input everything scales with. Change it and every route is recomputed.
2
Replace our placeholder prices with yours
Every price in the form is an assumption, not a market statistic. Put in your freelancer quote, your agency retainer, your salary figure and the AI subscriptions you actually pay for.
3
Add your own time
Editing, briefing and publishing take your hours. Enter what an hour of your time is worth and the table shows each route with and without it. Set it to 0 to compare cash only.
4
Read cost per post and per month
The cheapest route is highlighted. The Balzac row uses the real plans and prices from our pricing page.

Questions

How much does a blog post cost?

It depends on who writes it and how long it is, and we do not claim a single market price. Freelancer and agency rates vary widely by niche, length and quality, so this calculator starts from placeholder values that you replace with real quotes.

Where do the default numbers come from?

The freelancer, agency, salary, tool and time defaults are round placeholder assumptions we chose so the form works on first load. They are not surveyed averages. Only the Balzac plan prices and article counts are fixed: they come from the same plan data as our pricing page.

What does the in-house route include?

You enter the monthly fully loaded cost of one writer (salary and overhead) and how many posts that person can produce a month. If you want more posts than that, the calculator assumes you need more writers, rounded up.

Why include my own time?

Even when someone else writes, you brief, review, edit and publish. AI tools shift most of the work to you. Counting that time makes the comparison fairer, and you can set its hourly value to 0 to ignore it.

How does Balzac pricing work here?

Balzac has monthly plans with a set number of articles: the calculator picks the smallest plan that covers your posts per month, or several of the largest if you need more. Cost per post is the plan price divided by the posts you actually publish. Plan articles are approximate, as on the pricing page.

Is the Balzac route a fair comparison?

It compares price, not quality. Balzac drafts and publishes for you and you review the result; a specialist human writer may suit topics that need first-hand expertise. The review time is an editable assumption, so test it against your own standards using the 3 free articles.

Is my data sent anywhere?

No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing you type is stored or sent.

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