Here is the straight answer. Published market rates for having a professional write your LinkedIn and X presence cluster into three bands: roughly $500 to $1,500 a month at the entry level, $2,000 to $5,000 in the mid market where most founders land, and $5,000 to $15,000 and up for premium full-service work. Those figures come from Mylance's 2026 pricing guide, and they match what other providers publish, like Column, whose packages start at $2,000 a month for about 15 pieces. Megaphone Deploy is $15,000 one-time for a 90-day install, and continuing after that starts at $3,995 a month, so I will tell you exactly where we fall on that map and why.
I run content at Megaphone, which means my week is spent writing and reviewing founder content, and before that I was the first CMO at Copy.ai, where content pulled real weight in the run from zero to $2.5M ARR in under a year. I have also paid this cost in my own hours for years building my accounts to 93k on X and 26k on LinkedIn. So I have sat on every side of this purchase, and I want to walk through what the number actually buys, because comparing invoices alone will steer you to the wrong choice.
The three price bands, and what each one buys
The market for executive content support prices in monthly retainers, and the published guides agree on the shape more than you might expect.
Entry level, about $500 to $1,500 a month. Per Mylance's guide, this gets you roughly 4 to 8 posts on a schedule from a newer writer or a lighter package, with little voice work and almost no strategy. You are buying consistency and nothing else. The posts will ship on time and they will sound like posts.
Mid market, about $2,000 to $5,000 a month. This is where most founders land. The same guide describes 12 to 16 posts, real voice matching, a content calendar, and some performance tracking. Column's published starting rate of $2,000 a month for a full content team lands here too. Stretched across a year, Mylance points out this band is a $24,000 to $60,000 commitment, which is a part-time-hire sized line item and deserves the same scrutiny.
Premium, $5,000 to $15,000 and up. This band adds audience research, engagement support, and usually a small team instead of one writer. At the top of it you are paying for positioning work that touches everything under your name.
Per-post pricing exists if you want it, at $50 to $100 for entry writers up to $300 to $500 for senior ones by the same source, but almost everyone in this market steers you to a retainer. That preference is legitimate. A writer who works with you monthly learns your voice and improves with every batch, while a per-post writer starts cold each time.
What actually moves the number
Two providers can quote wildly different prices for what looks like the same deliverable count, and the gap almost always comes down to how the words get made.
The cheap version is invention. A writer reads your website, skims your industry, and produces plausible posts about your topic. This scales beautifully and it is why the low band exists. It also produces the exact failure founders describe to me most often: help that was paid for and drafts that never sounded like them. Across my time doing this work, when a founder complains about tone, the root cause is nearly always zero real inputs from the founder in the process. The writer had nothing of yours to work with, so they guessed.
The expensive version is extraction. Voice notes, prompts, structured questions that pull your actual stories and positions out of your head before anyone drafts a word. What surprised you this week, what a customer said, which common advice in your space you think is wrong. A writer with that raw material can sound like you, while one working without it can only produce the house style, and readers pattern-match house style fast. Mylance's guide names research depth and voice matching as primary price drivers, and that matches my experience exactly: the hours are in the extraction and editing, and the typing was never the product.
The other thing that moves the number is whether anyone is thinking about where the writing goes. A calendar tied to your actual goals, formats chosen because they perform for accounts like yours, and someone reading the numbers every week costs more than words on a schedule, and it should.
The costs that never show up on the invoice
The retainer is the visible cost. Two invisible ones decide whether the visible one was worth paying.
The first is your own time. The pitch of every service in this market is that content comes off your plate, and the trap in the mid band is paying $3,000 a month and still spending hours every week rewriting drafts that missed your voice. When I see that pattern, the extraction step is missing, and no amount of rewriting on your side fixes a process that starts from a blank page on theirs. Before you sign anything, ask precisely how your raw material gets into the drafts. If the answer is a monthly call and a Google Doc of topics, budget your own editing hours into the true price.
The second is reputation. Your feed is read by customers, investors, and candidates as evidence of how you think, and generic posts under your name spend that credibility down. A dark account only costs you the missed compounding, while a feed of obvious filler actively erodes the benefit of the doubt you would otherwise get. This is why I think the cheapest tier is often more expensive than it looks for anyone whose name carries weight, and why I tell founders to weigh the retainer against what the output does to their reputation, since that is where the real cost lives.
When cheap help or DIY is genuinely the right call
Paying for support is wrong for plenty of founders, and I would rather say so here than have you find out at month four of a contract.
Do it yourself if you are pre-revenue, still figuring out what you want to be known for, or have never held a posting schedule before. Your own reps teach you what lands in a way no report can, and the early years of my own accounts were exactly this. The commitment window I give founders for one clear lane is six to twelve months, and you can run that experiment for free before deciding it deserves budget.
Entry-level help makes sense when the job is purely mechanical, like keeping an already-defined voice on schedule while you are heads down. And any tier is premature if you cannot name what the presence is for. Pipeline, hiring, dealflow, or the next raise are answers. Visibility in general is a budget leak.
One more honest note on timing: whatever you buy, plan on a ramp. On a new or quiet account I anticipate six to eight weeks before we see much movement, because the algorithm has no foundation to learn from yet. A provider who promises inbound in week two is pricing your hope.
Where Megaphone lands and why
Our pricing is public, so you can place us on the map yourself. Megaphone Deploy is $15,000 one-time: over 90 days we install the full weekly plan, five X posts, three LinkedIn posts, and one long piece, built through the idea capture method described above so your side of the work is under an hour a week by month two. Keeping us on after that starts at $3,995 a month. Megaphone Deploy is a $15,000 one-time install over 90 days with an embedded strategist, and the guarantee is the install itself: full weekly plan live by week three, and on day 60 you decide whether to keep it going, expand it into the company, or take it over yourself, or we keep working free. Founder Authority OS is $197 one-time if you want the system to run yourself. We never sell hours, and we will never promise you leads or followers, because nobody can honestly promise behavior from a market.
That puts Studio in the upper mid band of the published ranges, priced on the bet that extraction plus a real operating system is the difference between content that ships and content that builds influence.
If you are weighing this decision with real numbers on the table, book a strategy call and we will walk through where you land: DIY, entry help, or a full system. You will get a straight answer either way, including the answer that you should wait.