On November 2, 2026, flat-rate posting services had a median entry price of $99 a month, and agencies that publish their prices had a median entry price of $575 a month. Flat-rate posting services sell fixed monthly plans, usually priced by the number of posts, and the entry plans that state a post count list a median of ten posts a month. Most agencies hide their prices: 11 of the 20 agencies we checked showed no price, and one more showed only a calculator. Scheduling software for one business on three channels had a median price of $32 a month, but the owner still writes and designs every post. Upwork gives social media managers a median rate of $20 an hour, and Payscale gives an employee an average base salary of $61,083 a year, about $5,090 a month before taxes and benefits.
We read the pricing or service pages of 45 provider sites and kept the 32 that sell ongoing social media help to small businesses in US dollars. Every number below comes from a page read on a stated date, and the dataset gives the source address for each row.
Disclosure: this study is published by boomp.net, which sells software and service plans in this market. Boomp's own prices are in their own section at the end, and they are not part of any statistic.
Price and owner time by who does the work
Each row is one way to get social media done. The middle half is the range between the 25th and 75th percentiles.
| Option | Who does the work | Median or average price | Typical range | Owner time a week | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | You plan, write, design and post | $0 with free tools | Free plans limit posts or channels | 8.4 hours (Picmim, posting manually) | 3 free plans |
| Scheduling software | You write and design; the software publishes | $32 a month (median) | $25 to $90.50 a month (middle half) | 5.7 hours (Picmim, scheduling tool) | 10 tools, one business, 3 channels, 1 user |
| Flat-rate posting service | The provider writes and designs a set number of posts | $99 a month (median entry plan) | $99 for 7 of 10; all from $35 to $149 | No source found | 10 services |
| Freelancer | One person, paid by the hour or a monthly retainer | $20 an hour (Upwork median) | $14 to $35 an hour; $400 to $2,000 a month for two channels (Upwork) | 4.2 hours (Picmim, about 14 owners) | Upwork guide and 2 freelancer sites |
| Agency | A team; some entry plans add monitoring, replies or reports | $575 a month (median entry plan) | $493.75 to $637.50 a month (middle half) | 3.8 hours (Picmim, about 24 owners) | 8 agencies with prices; 11 more hide them |
| Employee | A person on your payroll | $61,083 a year (Payscale average) | $41,000 to $88,000 a year (10th to 90th percentile) | No source found | 2,285 salary profiles |
Owner time comes from one source: Picmim's May 2026 online survey of 200 small-business owners in 12 European countries, grouped by how each owner handles social media. Picmim sells an AI social media tool, its groups are small, and no source we found measures owner time for flat-rate posting services or employees. We read the provider pages, Upwork, Payscale and SocialBee on November 2, 2026, and the other software prices between October 9 and November 1, 2026. To turn these numbers into a decision about who should do the work, read how much a social media manager costs.
Citation-friendly findings
Each finding names its own sample, so keep the sample and the date when you cite it.
- $99 a month was the median entry price of 10 flat-rate posting services on November 2, 2026; 7 of the 10 started at exactly $99, and all started between $35 and $149.
- $575 a month was the median entry price of the 8 agencies that published prices, and the middle half ran from $493.75 to $637.50.
- 11 of 20 agencies (55%) published no price, and one more showed only a calculator estimate; every posting service and both freelancer sites published a price.
- 5.8 times: the median agency entry price of $575 divided by the median posting-service entry price of $99.
- $800 a month was the median price of the agencies' middle or most popular plans (7 agencies, from $475 to $1,350).
- $9.90 against $62.50: the median price per post at the entry plan for posting services (6 that state a post count) and agencies (7).
- 17 of 20 (85%) published entry plans include content creation, and 2 agency entry plans ask the client to supply the content.
- $32 a month was the median cheapest paid plan of 10 scheduling tools for one business, three channels and one user (from $12 to $99).
- $20 an hour is Upwork's median rate for social media managers, with a typical range of $14 to $35 an hour from historical contracts worldwide (read November 2, 2026).
- $400 to $2,000 a month is Upwork's sample billing for two-channel small-business account management by an intermediate, US-based specialist.
- $61,083 a year is Payscale's average base salary for a social media manager (2,285 profiles, last updated September 28, 2026), about $5,090 a month before taxes and benefits.
- 6.3 hours a week was the average time on social media reported by 200 European small-business owners in Picmim's May 2026 vendor survey; owners who posted manually reported 8.4 hours, and owners with an agency reported 3.8 hours.
Suggested citation sentence: "Flat-rate posting services had a median entry price of $99 a month and agencies $575 a month, in a November 2, 2026 check of 32 small-business social media providers by boomp.net." Link to this page and keep the sample size and the date.
How many providers hide their prices
Of the 32 providers that fit the study, 20 published a monthly price, 11 published none, and 1 showed only a calculator estimate. All 12 that did not publish a price were agencies. The 11 agencies quote per business, offer a free quote, or show packages with no price. Three of them print market ranges or budget brackets that are not their own prices, and we did not count those as prices. Among the 13 agencies that state a US address, city, local phone or staff, 7 hid their prices. Most candidates came from searches that included price words, which favors pages that show prices, so the real share of agencies that hide prices is probably higher than 55%.
Flat-rate posting services
Ten services sell fixed monthly plans that a business can buy online without a proposal. Seven of the ten start at exactly $99 a month. The six entry plans that state a post count list a median of ten posts a month, and their median price per post is $9.90. Nine of the ten say they create the posts, and Roosterly describes scheduled posts and content curation. Eight of the ten state no contract or month-to-month billing, and none states a setup fee or a minimum term. Among the six that price a middle or most popular plan, the median price was $197 a month. Socinova's footer says it is made in India and Smarcomms' footer names a UK-registered business, and both price in US dollars.
| Service | Entry plan | Entry price a month | Posts a month at entry | Platforms at entry | Middle or most popular plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99 Dollar Social | Standard | $99 | 10 | 1 channel, $10 a month per extra channel | Plus, $149, 15 posts |
| Feedbird | Social Media Posts | From $99 | 10 | One of each channel | 20 and 30 post plans, no price shown |
| Socinova | Trial | $99 | 12 | Facebook and Instagram | Standard, $199, 12 posts |
| Smarcomms | Basic | $99 | 10 | 1 channel, $10 a month per extra channel | Plus, $195, 20 posts |
| Schedult | Standard | $99 | 10 | 2 channels | Plus, $199, 15 posts |
| Two Step Social | Lite | $99 | 4 | Unlimited channels | Basic, $199, 10 posts |
| Roosterly | Social media package | From $99 | Not stated | Not stated | No price shown |
| 75 Social | Single plan | $75 | Not stated | Not stated | Single plan |
| SocialSinQ | Build your own | From $35 | Priced at $5 a post | 1 channel, $10 a month per extra channel | Priced per post |
| 98 Buck Social (Engage365) | Not named | From $149 | Not stated | Unlimited platforms | No price shown |
Agencies
Twenty agencies fit the study, and eight published a monthly price. Their entry plans had a median price of $575 a month, from $399 at the low end to a "from" price of $1,000. The $1,000 page carries a heading that says 2020, and without it the median entry price was $550. Their middle or most popular plans had a median price of $800 a month, from $475 to $1,350. The seven entry plans that state a post count listed a median of 12 posts a month, and their median price per post was $62.50. Two of the eight entry plans ask the client to supply the content. Among the seven agencies that sell a plan where they make the content, the cheapest such plan had a median price of $600 a month. Three agencies state a setup or onboarding fee, and one states a six-month minimum. Some entry plans include more than posts, such as page monitoring and replies or a monthly report, so compare the scope before the price per post.
| Agency | Entry plan | Entry price a month | Posts a month at entry | Platforms at entry | Agency makes the content | Middle or most popular plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BizIQ | Reach | $399 | 4 | 1 | Yes | Engage, $599, 8 posts |
| FashionBar Chicago | Social media management | From $475 | 12 to 15 | Up to 3 | No, the client provides images and content | Single plan |
| Marketing House Media | One platform | $500 | 16 posts and shares; the page also lists 10 original posts | 1 | Yes | Two platforms, $900 |
| DasFort Media | Pro Package | $550 | 6 on each of 4 platforms | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google My Business | Yes | Pro+, $750 |
| Information Experts | Starter Social | $600 | Up to 8 | 1 to 2 | No, the client provides the content | Growth Social, $800, up to 12 posts |
| OM Concepts | Basic | $600 | 8 | 1 to 3 | Yes | Standard, $1,200, 12 posts |
| LYFE Marketing | Good Plan | $750 | 12 | Facebook and Instagram | Yes | Better Plan, $1,350 |
| Digital Shift Media | Custom packages | From $1,000 | Not stated | Not stated | Yes | No price shown |
If you sell social media management and want to price your own packages, how to price social media services is written for you.
Freelancers
Only two freelancer sites in the check published a price, so they are examples, not a benchmark. Magic & Muse starts at $250 a month for one platform and 8 to 10 posts. Rated Aesthetically starts from $500 a month for one platform, three posts a week and one photo shoot. For a wider view we used Upwork's social media manager cost guide, read November 2, 2026. It gives a median of $20 an hour and a typical range of $14 to $35 an hour, from historical contracts worldwide. Its table of sample monthly billing by intermediate, US-based specialists puts small-business account management at $400 to $2,000 a month for two channels and $200 to $1,500 for each extra channel. These are Upwork's estimates, not a survey of what US freelancers charge. The guide to freelance social media manager rates turns an hourly rate into a monthly estimate and lists the questions to ask before you hire.
Scheduling software
Scheduling software publishes the posts that you write and design. For one business with three channels and one user, the cheapest paid plan of ten tools had a median price of $32 a month. Hootsuite shows only its price with annual billing, so a month-to-month plan costs more than the $99 shown.
| Tool and plan | Monthly price for this setup | How the price works | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publer Professional | $12 | 3 accounts, billed monthly | October 16, 2026 |
| Buffer Essentials | $18 | $6 per channel, billed monthly | October 20, 2026 |
| Later Starter | $25 | 1 social set of 8 profiles, billed monthly | November 1, 2026 |
| Metricool Starter | $25 | 5 brands, billed monthly | October 16, 2026 |
| SocialBee Bootstrap | $29 | 5 profiles and 1 user, billed monthly | November 2, 2026 |
| Sendible Core | $35 | 6 profiles, billed monthly | October 16, 2026 |
| Loomly Starter | $65 | 12 accounts and 3 users, billed monthly | October 9, 2026 |
| Hootsuite Standard | $99 | Per user, billed annually | October 16, 2026 |
| Sprout Social Essentials | $99 | Per seat with 5 profiles, billed monthly | October 9, 2026 |
| Vista Social Professional | $99 | 15 profiles, billed monthly | October 16, 2026 |
Three tools also show free plans on their pricing pages. Buffer's covers three channels with ten scheduled posts per channel, Publer's covers three accounts other than X with ten scheduled posts each, and Metricool's covers one brand with 20 posts a month and no LinkedIn or X. Meta Business Suite is free for scheduling Facebook and Instagram posts, and it is not in the table.
Employees
Payscale's average base salary for a social media manager is $61,083 a year, from 2,285 salary profiles last updated September 28, 2026. Its 10th to 90th percentile range runs from $41,000 to $88,000, and its median is about $61,000. That is about $5,090 a month in base pay, before payroll taxes, benefits, tools and the time it takes to manage the role. We found no US government wage figure for social media managers. A related Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation, public relations specialists, had a median of $74,750 a year in May 2025; its duties include social media programs, but we did not use it as social media manager pay.
Owner time: what the evidence shows
Our search found no current US survey of the hours small-business owners spend on social media. The most recent owner survey we found is Picmim's, run online in May 2026 with 200 owners in 12 European countries, 87% of them with one to ten employees. Its owners averaged 6.3 hours a week on social media. Picmim sells an AI social media tool, and its page does not say how the owners were recruited.
| How the owner handles social media | Share of the 200 owners | Hours a week | Hours a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posting manually, no tools | 34%, about 68 owners | 8.4 | 36.4 |
| Basic scheduling tool | 28%, about 56 owners | 5.7 | 24.7 |
| AI tool, the category Picmim sells | 19%, about 38 owners | 2.1 | 9.1 |
| Social media agency | 12%, about 24 owners | 3.8 | 16.5 |
| Freelance social media manager | 7%, about 14 owners | 4.2 | 18.2 |
Hours a month use 52 weeks divided by 12 months. Groups of 14 and 24 owners are too small for close comparisons, and the AI-tool row comes from a company that sells such a tool. In every group, owners still spent time each week, including 3.8 hours for owners with an agency and 4.2 hours for owners with a freelancer. The best-documented figure describes professionals, not owners: Sprout Social's 2024 productivity report found 5 hours a week on content creation and approvals among 500 full-time social marketers at US and UK companies with at least 500 employees, surveyed in December 2023. The only other owner surveys we found are from 2012 and 2013, too old to describe today's platforms. You may also see 12 to 40 hours a month, or 3 to 10 hours a week, credited to Glow Social, Boomp's former name. Those figures came from an earlier version of our own time guide, which named no survey for them, and we removed them on August 3, 2026, so do not cite them. Your own hours matter more than any average, and how much time social media marketing takes shows how to count them task by task.
How to use these numbers
- Decide who should do the work before you compare prices, because each row of the first table is a different job. A coach or real estate agent who mainly needs regular posts is buying a different job from a restaurant that needs daily specials and quick replies.
- Compare entry plans on the same terms: posts a month, platforms, who makes the content, and what else is included.
- Ask any provider that hides its prices for a written scope and a monthly price, then compare it with the published plans above.
- Count your own hours for two typical weeks, then put them next to a quote in the social media management cost calculator.
Methodology
- What counts as a provider. A site that offers ongoing social media management or posting to businesses, aims at small businesses, is written in English and shows prices only in US dollars. We recorded where each provider says it is based but did not use location to include or exclude it, because US owners also buy from providers elsewhere.
- How we found them. In this order: three services from our own dated vendor list, 35 web searches run on November 2, 2026, the competitors named on 99 Dollar Social's comparison index, and a short list of well-known small-business agencies. We stopped once 45 provider sites had been reached and read, and 11 more rows record sites we could not reach (7) or did not check after a guessed address failed (4).
- How we read each page. We saved each provider's own pricing or service page and read its visible text. Pages that blocked a plain request or drew prices with scripts were opened in a headless browser and saved, and one price sheet is a PDF. We did not sign in, submit forms, request quotes or contact anyone.
- Types. A freelancer is one named person, or a site that speaks as "I". A flat-rate posting service sells fixed national plans at a published monthly price, usually priced by post count, with online signup and no proposal. An agency is a team or local office that sells by package, retainer or proposal.
- Status. Published means the provider's own site shows a monthly price for an ongoing package, either fixed or "from". Hidden means the site sells the service but shows no price, and partial means it shows only a calculator estimate.
- Exclusions. We read and excluded 13 sites: 3 for another currency or a Canadian business, 2 that are not small-business offers, 4 with no standalone social media offer, and 4 whose offer we could not verify from the page.
- Plans. The entry plan is the lowest monthly price shown for an ongoing social media package, recorded as shown, including "from" prices. SocialSinQ prices each post at $5 and says "from just $35 per month", so we recorded $35. The middle plan is the one the provider marks Popular, Most Popular, Best Value or Featured; otherwise it is the middle plan, or the lower of the two middle plans.
- Posts. We used the lower end of a stated range, multiplied per-platform counts by the number of platforms, and converted weekly counts at 52 weeks divided by 12 months.
- Software. The setup is one business, three channels and one user, at the monthly-billing price where the page shows one. Prices come from vendor pricing pages read between October 9 and November 2, 2026.
- Statistics. A script computed every median and quartile from the dataset, and nothing is weighted. Quartiles use linear interpolation, the same rule as Excel's QUARTILE.INC, so they can fall between real prices.
- Boomp. Boomp's own plans are not in any statistic or in the dataset.
Limitations
- The sample is not random. Most candidates came from searches with price words, which favor pages that show prices, so the hidden-price share (34% overall, 55% of agencies) is probably lower than in the wider market.
- The groups are small: 8 agencies, 10 posting services and 2 freelancers published prices. The freelancer figures are examples, not a benchmark.
- Agencies that show prices may not charge what agencies that hide them charge, and we cannot tell which way the difference runs.
- Entry plans differ in scope. Some agency plans include replies, reporting, ad boosting or photography, and one posting service describes curated content, so price per post is a rough comparison.
- Six of the 20 published providers state no location, two give only a toll-free number, and two say they are based outside the US. Counting only the providers that state some US presence, such as an address, a city or US staff, the median entry price was $525 for agencies (6) and $99 for posting services.
- One agency page (Digital Shift Media) carries a heading that says "Pricing in 2020". Without it, the median agency entry price is $550.
- 98 Buck Social (now Engage365) shows "From $149/Mo" on its homepage, but its plans page shows plan names without prices.
- Roosterly's homepage names a $99 a month social media package, but its social media page, read November 2, 2026, shows $169 a month. We recorded the lower price, as the entry-plan rule requires.
- Prices change often, and every price is as read on the date in its row.
- Upwork's hourly figures come from historical contracts worldwide, and its monthly figures are estimates in a sample table, not a survey. Payscale's figures are self-reported salary profiles and cover base pay only.
- This study has no current US survey of owners' hours. The owner-time figures come from a European vendor survey, and the professional figure comes from large companies.
Changes from the earlier version
This page first went up on May 26, 2026, with ranges drawn from customer conversations and general package checks and without a source record. We took it down on August 10, 2026, and this study replaces it at the same address, so do not cite figures from the earlier version.
Get the data
Download the dataset as a CSV file. It has one row for each of the 56 provider sites we checked, including those that hid prices, were excluded or could not be reached, plus the 10 scheduling tools, the 3 free plans, Upwork's figures and Payscale's salary. Each row gives the source address and the date we read it, and Boomp's own prices are not in the file. You are welcome to cite it with a link to this page under the boomp.net terms of service, and the citation format is at the end of the page.
Where Boomp fits
Boomp is the publisher's own product, so it is not in any statistic above. Boomp is software that reads a business's public website and writes social media posts about it.
- Packs, $9 a month: ten finished posts made from your website arrive each month by email link, and you publish them; nothing is connected.
- Core, $39 a month: 20 posts, one carousel and one short video a month, published to your connected channels after you approve each one in the app, which is the default. Kathleen Celmins, Boomp's founder, approves posts this way in about ten minutes a week for her own accounts; that is her estimate, not a survey.
- Service plans with Kathleen: Social, handled is $275 a month, and Kathleen reviews every post before it is scheduled. Local marketing, $900 a month, adds Google Business Profile updates, a review-request process, one new or improved search page and up to two small website updates a month. Marketing partner, $1,800 a month, adds a second search page, a customer email, an offer page or promotion, and a monthly planning and progress call. Both start with a 15-minute call, and the work is agreed before payment.
No plan includes ads, replies to comments or reviews, or photo and video shoots, and no plan has a contract. Every paid plan charges from day one, and all the plans and prices are on one page. Whichever option you choose, current facts, permissions and claims your profession regulates, such as fair housing rules for real estate agents, stay with you. To see what Boomp would write for your business first, enter your website and email for ten free finished posts with images, a carousel and a short video; the link arrives by email, with no account or card.