Sakativa vs. building it in-house.
An honest, line-item comparison of what it costs to do this work yourself versus plugging in our team.
The honest comparison
Building a marketing department in-house is the right move at a certain size — usually $20M+ in revenue with a multi-product roadmap. Below that, the math almost never works. Here's the line-item breakdown.
| In-house | Sakativa | |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Director | $110,000/yr | Included |
| Google Ads specialist | $72,000/yr | Included |
| Meta Ads specialist | $68,000/yr | Included |
| SEO + content lead | $65,000/yr | Included |
| Local SEO / GBP manager | $55,000/yr | Included |
| Web/dev support | $48,000/yr | Included |
| Benefits (~25%) | ~$104,000/yr | Included |
| Software stack | $14,400/yr | Included |
| Total / year | ~$536,000 | $23,988 |
What the spreadsheet hides
You also save 6–12 months of hiring and ramp time, all the management overhead, the cost of mis-hires (industry average is one in three), and the risk of any single hire underperforming. With Sakativa, the team is in place day one and the senior strategist has 7+ years of in-platform reps before they ever touch your account.
When in-house actually wins
- You have one core channel and need a true expert in it
- Your product team needs marketing tightly embedded in roadmap and launches
- You're at $20M+ revenue with a multi-product motion
- You need brand work (research, identity, positioning) — not just performance
When Sakativa wins
- You need 3+ channels covered (most growing businesses do)
- You can't justify a full marketing org but are losing leads to bigger competitors
- You want senior operators without senior-operator overhead
- You want to scale or shrink the engagement without firing people
Common questions
What if we already have one in-house marketer?+
Great — we partner with them. We become the senior team behind them, not a replacement. They get senior mentorship, you get full-stack coverage, no one gets laid off.
Do we lose institutional knowledge with an outside team?+
No more than with a hire who leaves. We document everything in your shared Notion/Drive: playbooks, account structures, naming conventions, KPI baselines. If you ever leave Sakativa, you take the whole binder with you.
What's the real catch?+
We're not a fit for everyone. If you need 40 hours a week of marketing labor on one channel, hire that specialist. If you need 8 channels covered well by senior people, that's us.
Ready to plug it in?
Get all 8 services for $1,999/month. Book a 15-minute strategy call and we'll show you exactly how it works for your business.