Same work, and the two agents were paying $400 and $900 for it

Question

Two agents in my building asked if I'd take over their Instagram and I quoted nothing, because I genuinely don't know what this work goes for. One said her last person charged four hundred. The other is paying nine hundred and describes the same thing: posts, a couple of reels, some listing graphics.

What sits in that gap? And the tool list somebody handed me was Canva Pro, a scheduler and a music subscription, which comes to maybe sixty a month total. Is that really the whole software bill?

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

A retainer is a flat monthly fee for a named set of deliverables, so the gap between $400 and $900 is almost always a difference in what's inside the set and who does the shooting.

Rough shape of the market, and it moves a lot by metro: $300 to $800 a month when the client hands you photos, video clips and notes and you assemble and schedule. $1,000 to $2,500 when you're going to properties and capturing your own material or doing real strategy work on the brand. Written listing descriptions on their own tend to run $25 to $75 each. A single edited vertical reel from footage you're given, somewhere around $75 to $250.

The tool list is close but light. Canva Pro is around $15 a month. A scheduler runs $20 to $60 depending on how many accounts you connect. Editing can be free on CapCut's basic tier or roughly $60 a month if you want Premiere inside the Adobe plan. Music is $10 to $30. The part people skip: most music libraries sell a personal tier that doesn't cover posting to a client's account, and you need the plan that permits client work. That's the line item that turns into a muted post later.

The cost nobody quotes is approvals. Two agents wanting three rounds of caption edits each can add four or five hours a month that never appears in your price. Track it from your first client so your second quote is built on your real hours.

brandonlee36 · Answer

I pay $450 a month for 12 posts across two rental accounts, and I hand over the photos plus a paragraph of notes per unit. It's assembly work and it's priced like assembly work. If you're driving to properties and shooting, you're not in that band and you shouldn't be quoting against it.

angela_burke · Answer

Log hours on your first two clients before you publish a price. Ours land between 6 and 9 hours a month at $900, so about $110 an hour on paper and closer to $85 once you count the calls that never get billed. Per-post pricing fell apart for us as we grew, because all the small extra asks arrive free.

Rena Expert · Answer

Write the revision policy before you write the price. At $600 a month and 9 hours you're at $67 an hour, and one client who treats captions as a draft process takes you to 14 hours without the fee changing. One round included, named hourly after, in the agreement.

Churn is the number that decides whether this is a business. Content clients leave heaviest in the first 90 days, and almost always because they expected listing appointments and got reach. Agree at signing what you're both looking at, profile visits and inbound DMs being the honest ones, and put it in the onboarding email so month three isn't a fight about attribution.

On the music point above, the exposure is worse than a wasted subscription. A track flagged for commercial use gets the audio stripped or the post pulled, and the strike lands on your client's account rather than yours. That is the phone call that ends a retainer.

Term and notice: a three month initial period with 30 days' written notice after that is normal and it stops February from being a surprise. Get paid on the first, not on delivery, or you'll be chasing $600 invoices for work already published.

And don't price as a share of anyone's commission. It makes every conversation an argument about which closing came from which reel, and depending on the state it can raise questions about whether you're being compensated for licensed activity. Confirm that with your state commission if anyone proposes it.

Same work, and the two agents were paying $400 and $900 for it

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