A media buyer costs anywhere from about $2,000 a month for a freelancer to $150,000 a year or more for a senior in-house hire, depending on how you buy the service. Agencies typically charge a $2,500 to $10,000 monthly retainer or 10% to 20% of your ad spend. Each model has honest tradeoffs, and the one you pick matters more as you spend more.
Here is what each option really costs and who it fits. If you are still working out what a media buyer does before pricing one, start with our plain-English guide to media buying.
Agency retainers
A flat monthly retainer is the most common agency model for small and mid-size accounts. Expect $2,500 to $5,000 a month for a small agency or a solo shop, $5,000 to $10,000 for a more established one, and $10,000-plus for agencies that work larger budgets or specialized accounts.
What you get is a team instead of one person: a strategist, a buyer, sometimes a creative resource. What you give up is dedicated attention. Your account is one of many an account manager runs, and the person actually clicking around inside your ad account is often more junior than the person who sold you the deal.
Retainers make sense when your spend is high enough that the fee is a small slice of your budget and low enough that a percentage model would cost more. A $5,000 retainer on $60,000 a month of spend is about 8%. The same retainer on $8,000 of spend is over 60% of your budget, which is a bad deal.
Freelancer rates
A freelance media buyer runs $2,000 to $6,000 a month on retainer, or $75 to $200 an hour, or 10% to 15% of spend. Rates track experience. Someone two years in who has never managed real budget sits at the bottom. Someone who has managed seven figures a month and can prove it sits at the top and is worth it.
Freelancers are the best value when you find a good one, because you are paying for one person's time with no agency overhead on top. The risk is concentration. One person gets sick, takes a vacation, or takes on too many clients, and your account is the one that goes unwatched. You are also trusting their judgment alone, with no team to catch mistakes.
Vet freelancers on real numbers. Ask what they spent, in what vertical, and what the result was. Anyone who has actually managed budget will talk in cost per acquisition and return on ad spend, not in vague wins.
In-house salary
Hiring a media buyer in-house costs $60,000 to $90,000 a year for a mid-level buyer and $100,000 to $160,000-plus for a senior one, before payroll taxes, benefits, and tools. Fully loaded, a senior in-house buyer can run $180,000 to $200,000 a year.
In-house wins when paid media is core to your business and your spend justifies a full salary. A dedicated buyer knows your product, your margins, and your customer in a way no agency ever will, and their incentives are aligned with the company, not with billing you more hours.
The catch is coverage and single-point risk. One person cannot watch an account 24 hours a day, and when they leave, their knowledge and their account access walk out with them. Most in-house teams under five people also lack the volume to have seen every edge case, which is exactly the experience you are paying an agency for.
Percentage of ad spend
The percentage-of-spend model charges you 10% to 20% of what you spend on ads. Spend $50,000 a month, pay $5,000 to $10,000 in management fees on top.
This model looks fair on the surface and gets worse the more you scale. The problem is the incentive. Your buyer's pay goes up when your spend goes up, whether or not that extra spend is profitable. That is exactly backwards from what you want, which is a buyer who will tell you to spend less when the account is not ready to scale. We make the full case, with a worked example, in flat fee vs percentage of ad spend.
Percentage models fit early, when your spend is low and a flat retainer would be a huge share of your budget. They stop making sense the moment your spend gets large enough that the percentage becomes real money for the same amount of work.
Where software and AI fit
Software changes the math because it does not price like a person. A human buyer, however you pay them, is bounded by hours in the day and the number of accounts they can watch. Software is not. An AI media buyer can watch every campaign continuously, react around the clock, and run many accounts at once for a fraction of a salary or a percentage of large spend.
This is the gap Mebume fills. Instead of a retainer, a salary, or a percentage that grows with your budget, you get a fully automated ads manager that runs your Meta and Google campaigns around the clock inside guardrails you set. See our pricing for the actual numbers, and who Mebume is built for if you want to check the fit.
Software does not replace strategy. You still need someone deciding what to sell, to whom, and at what margin. What it replaces is the expensive, hour-bound execution layer: the constant watching and adjusting that a person cannot sustain 24 hours a day and that a percentage-of-spend deal overcharges you for.
If you want expert-level management on your accounts without a retainer or a salary, join the waitlist for early access to Mebume.
