What an Outsourced Growth Team Actually Costs in Australia

Somewhere in your planning doc is a line that says "we need more marketing capability". The question that decides your next two years is what form you buy it in: hire the team, rent the channels, or bring in one integrated growth team from outside. Everyone selling you one of those three will happily price the other two vaguely. So here are the real numbers for all three, what moves them, and the fees that tend to appear after the contract is signed. We'd rather you walk into every conversation, including ours, already knowing how the game works.

Start with the team, not the fees

Price the job before you price the provider. Run a modern growth function properly and you're covering roughly eleven roles: someone to lead it, performance media, lifecycle and CRM, conversion, content, social, search and AI visibility, HubSpot or equivalent engineering, marketing ops, design, and production management.

How many of the eleven you actually need is set by your goals, not your headcount or your revenue. A business happy with steady referrals can run on a fraction of this list. But the moment growth becomes a number the board expects rather than hopes for, every uncovered role starts costing more than the salary would have, you just pay for it in misses instead of wages.

The worked example below prices the full set; scale it to your ambition.

Sit with the left side of that comparison for a moment, because the $1.8M is the polite version. It doesn't include the three to six months of recruiting before anyone starts, the ramp-up before anyone performs, the wrong hire you'll make somewhere across eleven seats, or the resignation that takes a channel's momentum out the door with it.

And the right side isn't a discounted copy of the left. It's a different way of building the same coverage, which is why the gap is that wide.

Two honesty notes, because this comparison only works if it's straight. First, you're not buying eleven full-time humans, you're buying eleven roles' worth of coverage from a small senior team multiplied by AI agents we build ourselves, which is exactly how the economics close.

Second, almost nobody actually hires the eleven. The real-world alternative is usually two overworked generalists for $250k a year who can cover neither the strategy nor the execution, which is a harder gap to see on a budget line and a much more expensive one in lost growth.

This is a benchmark, not a pitch to replace your marketers: most clients run us alongside an internal marketer or a small team, and the combination is the point.

And yes, we know most firms won't put a dollar figure anywhere near their website. That's precisely why this one is here.

The rented version: what the agency market charges

The third way to buy capability is the familiar one: agency retainers, channel by channel. These are Australian market ranges, drawn from published pricing guides and our own experience of the market.

Treat them as brackets, not quotes.

You'll find cheaper. $1,500-a-month retainers exist, and they cost $1,500 for a reason: templated work, junior hands, and a report that arrives whether anything happened or not. Below a certain price a retainer stops being a growth partner and becomes a subscription to activity.

Common single-service and project ranges sit inside those tiers:
SEO retainers mostly land between $2,000 and $5,000 a month before they're funded well enough to work. Google Ads management runs $3,000 to $20,000 a month, and many agencies also take 10 to 20% of your media budget, which is worth knowing before you scale spend.

Blog content runs $300 to $1,000 an article. A custom business website typically lands between $20,000 and $40,000, and climbs well past that with complex integrations. Brand and positioning work is the widest range in the industry, roughly $25,000 for a sharp SMB engagement to several hundred thousand at the top end, because you're buying thinking, and thinking is priced by who's doing it.

The catch with renting channels is the seams. Three specialist retainers from three suppliers costs Mid-Market money three times over, and nobody owns the whole number. A retainer buys a channel. A growth team owns an outcome. That difference is the entire reason this article isn't called "what does an agency cost".

The four ways you'll be quoted

Whichever route you take, every price you're shown will be one of four models wearing different clothes.

Most engagements blend two of these: a project to build the thing, a retainer to run it. That's the shape of our Programs too, a defined build with a scorecard, then an operating rhythm, priced as a scope rather than a stack of hours.

The fees nobody leads with

The quoted price is rarely the whole price. Five things appear in invoices that rarely appear on websites: an onboarding or discovery fee at the start (often $5,000 to $20,000, and worth paying when it's real strategy rather than a paperwork toll), software licences billed through the provider, the percentage of media spend mentioned above, a 10 to 20% markup on third-party services like print or photography, and change orders when the scope moves.

None of these is dishonest. Hiding them until the first invoice is. Ask for all five in writing before you sign, and watch how comfortably they answer. That comfort level is data.

What actually moves the price

Two quotes for the same brief can differ by ten times, and both can be honest. What separates them: whose hands touch the work (a senior strategist's week costs what a junior's month does, and is usually cheaper per result), how sharp the scope is (vague briefs get priced with a risk margin), how fast you need it, who carries the risk of it not working, and the ratio of thinking to doing. That last one matters most, and it's about to matter more.

The AI wrinkle nobody's pricing honestly yet

Here's the 2026 part of this guide. AI has reduced the cost of production. The first draft, the resize, the reporting export, the routine build: work that used to fill billable hours now takes far less time. So the useful question when you compare quotes is no longer "how many hours and deliverables do I get?", because volume is the part of the work that got cheaper. It's also what makes the growth-team model newly possible: a small senior team with AI handling the production can genuinely cover what took eleven people five years ago.

What didn't get cheaper is judgement: the strategy, the position, the call on what's worth making and what to kill. We've written about why taste just got expensive as its own piece, but the pricing consequence is simple. Ask "who does the thinking, and what happens because of it?"

A provider optimised for high-volume production is not a bargain in a world where production was never the valuable part.

One caution: while everyone's excited about the leverage, it applies to us as much as anyone. AI doesn't make people limitless, and "the team can do more now" is not a licence to run them hot.

Thinking is taxing in a way tools don't fix, and judgement is a finite resource: it's sharpest when people have room, and it degrades fast in a team running at redline. The point of giving AI the production work isn't to cram more jobs into the same brains.

It's to protect the hours of clear thinking your results actually depend on. So add this to your questions for any provider: what do you do with the time AI gives back? The right answer is better thinking. The wrong answer is more volume, because a partner burning out their people is burning the exact asset you're paying for.

It's also why we price the way we do: Programs with a defined scope, a senior team, and a scorecard, rather than a timesheet. You should pay for what moves, not for how long we sat there.

Seven questions that keep any growth partner honest

Take these into every pitch, including one with us.

1. What's the full first-year cost, including onboarding, tech and media percentages?

2. Who exactly works on my account, and how senior are they?

3. What does the scope include, word for word, and what's a change order?

4. How do you use AI, and does that efficiency show up in my price or your margin?

5. What do you measure, and what happens when the numbers stall?

6. How do I leave, and what do I keep if I do?

7. And the quiet one that tells you the most: can I speak to a client who's been with you for more than two years?

A partner that answers all seven without flinching is worth shortlisting at any price. One that can't is expensive at any price.

You now know more about growth-team pricing than most people who sign the contracts. If the numbers made you inhale, start smaller but sharper: one well-chosen Program aimed at your biggest constraint beats a thin retainer spread across everything.

And when you want to know what your version costs, that's a 20-minute conversation. We'll give you a number, not an "it depends".