Both options solve the same problem: nobody at your company is doing marketing consistently. But they solve it in very different ways. deptmatic is an AI marketing department that audits your site daily, drafts SEO, content, social, and email work, and ships only what you approve — flat monthly, cancel anytime. Hiring an in-house marketer puts a dedicated human on your payroll who owns strategy, relationships, and hands-on execution full time.
This page is meant to be fair, not a sales pitch. The honest answer is that these aren't really the same product, and the cheaper option isn't automatically the right one. Here's the specific math and the real tradeoffs for 2026, so you can tell which fits your stage.
| deptmatic | Hiring an in-house marketer | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $190 Starter / $490 Growth / $990 Scale per month, flat. Roughly $2,280-$11,880/yr all-in. | $60,000-$90,000/yr base salary. Fully loaded with payroll taxes, benefits, tools and overhead, realistically $95,000-$140,000/yr. |
| What you get | A daily site audit plus drafted SEO, content, social and email work every week — output volume, not a person. | One full-time person who owns strategy, judgment, brand voice, vendor relationships and hands-on execution. |
| Who does the work | AI drafts everything; you approve before anything ships (human-approval gate). Bring-your-own-Claude. | A hired human does the thinking and the doing, and can be held accountable for results. |
| Setup time | Live in a day. Connect your site and it starts auditing and drafting immediately. | 6-12 weeks to hire, plus 1-3 months of ramp before they're fully productive. |
| Lock-in | None. Month-to-month, cancel anytime, no severance or notice period. | Salary commitment, onboarding cost, and the real friction and cost of letting someone go if it isn't working. |
| Capacity ceiling | High draft throughput, but bounded by your time to review and approve. No independent strategy. | One person's bandwidth, but real strategic ownership and the ability to run campaigns end to end. |
| Best for | Founders and small teams that need consistent marketing output shipped, and have someone to spend 2-4 hours/week approving it. | Companies ready to invest six figures in a dedicated owner who lives inside the business and drives strategy. |
Choose deptmatic when you need marketing to actually happen every week, your budget is measured in hundreds a month not thousands, and you have a person willing to spend a few hours reviewing and approving drafts. It closes the "nothing is getting done" gap fast and cheap, with no hiring risk. Choose an in-house marketer when you need someone to own strategy, make judgment calls without you in the loop, build relationships with partners and press, run live campaigns, and be accountable for revenue — and you can genuinely afford the fully-loaded six-figure cost. deptmatic drafts and ships work; it does not replace a strategic hire's ownership and judgment. Many companies use deptmatic first, then hire in-house once marketing justifies a full salary — and some run both, with the marketer directing deptmatic's output instead of doing every draft by hand.
For output, often yes — it produces SEO, content, social and email drafts on a schedule. For ownership and strategy, no. A hired marketer sets direction, makes independent calls, and is accountable for results. deptmatic drafts work and waits for your approval; it doesn't own your strategy or your outcomes.
Because you're not paying for a full-time human's time, benefits, or overhead — you're paying for AI-drafted output plus a review gate. The tradeoff is that you (or someone on your team) still has to approve what ships, and there's no person to delegate judgment to.
deptmatic runs on Claude, and you connect your own Claude access rather than paying deptmatic a markup on AI usage. Your flat monthly fee covers the deptmatic platform — the daily audits, the drafting workflows, and the approval system.
Plan on a few hours a week to review and approve drafts. It generates the work, but nothing ships without your yes, so it's only as fast as your review cadence. If you have zero time to approve anything, a dedicated hire who works autonomously may serve you better.
Yes, and that's a common path. deptmatic is month-to-month with no lock-in, so many teams use it to keep marketing moving until the workload justifies a full salary, then hire in-house — sometimes keeping deptmatic so the new marketer directs its output instead of drafting everything manually.