Every growing SME hits the agency vs freelancer vs in-house question, usually at the moment the founder realises they're the marketing department and it isn't working. The instinct is to ask which option is cheapest. That's the wrong question, because all three cost roughly the same once you count properly. The right question is what each one can't do — and that's what decides whether you're buying marketing or buying a new problem.
The honest annual cost
Salaries are only the start of an in-house cost. Add employer contributions, pension, tools, recruitment and the desk, and a fully loaded hire runs about 1.3× the salary. Morgan McKinley's 2026 guide puts a London marketing manager at £50,000–£80,000; JobJump's 2026 data puts the German median around €66,000. Freelancers and agencies bill what they bill, but you're paying for their overhead too — it's just inside the day rate.
Look at the overlap. Once loaded, one in-house hire, a decent freelancer roster and a mid-band agency retainer all land in the £40,000–£80,000 zone. Price won't decide this for you. Coverage will.
In-house: one person, one skill set
The fantasy is a marketing manager who does strategy, paid, SEO, content, design, email and analytics. That person doesn't exist at £60,000, and if they did they'd be running their own agency. What you actually hire is one strong skill and five adequate ones. Within six months, the good hires realise this and start managing freelancers and agencies — which is the right move, but it means you've hired a coordinator at a manager's salary. The real advantage of in-house is not cost or breadth: it's ownership. Someone whose entire job is your growth, who sits in the sales meeting, who knows why last quarter was bad. That's worth a lot. It's just not the same thing as execution capacity.
Freelancers: cheapest per hour, priciest to coordinate
A good freelance PPC specialist or copywriter is often better at their one thing than an agency's account team, and costs less per day. For a single channel with a clear brief, freelancers are frequently the best option available. The problems start when you need three of them. Nobody owns the strategy, nobody notices that the landing page copy and the ad copy make different promises, and when your best one lands a full-time contract in March your channel goes dark. You become the agency — briefing, reviewing, reconciling — usually at the worst possible hourly rate: yours.
Agency: breadth and continuity, if you pick right
What an agency actually sells is a team you couldn't hire — strategist, media buyer, writer, designer, developer — under one accountable lead, with cover when someone's ill. For an SME that needs more than one channel coordinated, that breadth is the product. The failure modes are well known: the senior person vanishes after the pitch, juniors run the account, lock-in contracts, reports full of impressions. We wrote twelve questions that expose all of that in the first meeting. Ask them. The other honest limit: an agency will never care about your business the way an owner does. It can be excellent, but it's not obsessed. That's the in-house job.
The hybrid most SMEs end up with — usually two years late
Here's the pattern across almost every client we've worked with in Berlin and London: they start with the founder doing it, hire one marketer, discover the coverage gap, bolt on freelancers, drown in coordination, then bring in an agency to run execution while the in-house person owns strategy and the numbers. It works. It would have worked two years earlier and cost less, because the two failed intermediate steps are where the money went.
The hybrid, done deliberately:
- One in-house owner (often the founder until ~€2M revenue, then a marketing lead) who owns the plan, the numbers and the sales handover.
- An agency for coordinated execution — paid, content, site, email — with a senior contact and a report in leads and cost per lead. Budget here is £3,000–£6,000 a month for most SMEs.
- Specialist freelancers for spikes — a launch video, a rebrand, a one-off research piece — briefed through the agency or the owner, not both.
A rough rule by stage
- Under €500k revenue: founder-led plus one or two freelancers on the single channel that's proven to work. Don't hire yet; don't retain an agency yet.
- €500k–€5M: the hybrid. One owner in-house (can be the founder at the low end), agency for execution. This is where most of the compounding happens.
- €5M+: a small in-house team (lead plus one or two specialists) with an agency for the channels that need scale or rare skills — and for the platform builds nobody hires a full-time developer for.
Berlin, London, and where the agency sits
London salaries are the highest in the chart, which is why so many London SMEs buy agency capacity from outside the capital: same seniority, less rent in the invoice, and the difference becomes media budget. Berlin is cheaper to hire in but shallower for senior performance talent, so agencies fill the seniority gap there instead of the cost gap. Either way, the agency's postcode matters less than who's actually on the account. We serve both markets from Berlin — more on that in what to expect from a B2B agency in London.
The short version
In-house buys ownership, freelancers buy depth in one thing, an agency buys coordinated breadth. Loaded costs overlap, so decide on coverage, not price. Most SMEs between €500k and €5M should run one in-house owner plus an agency — and should do it before, not after, the two expensive detours.
Not sure which stage you're at? Contact us or email info@bsadoes.it with your revenue band, who does marketing today, and what's not working. We'll tell you plainly which model fits — including when the answer is "hire someone, don't retain us". We work with clients in Berlin, London, and remotely worldwide.