What a fractional creative + web team costs: the real numbers

A fully loaded in-house creative team costs $300K–$800K per year. "Fully loaded" means salaries plus benefits, payroll taxes, tools, recruiting, and management overhead, not just the numbers on the offer letters.

Two figures make in-house more expensive than it looks. First, utilization: you pay for 40 hours a week, but in-house teams typically spend around 40% of their time on admin, meetings, and training, so roughly half of every salaried hour produces work. Second, the hiring cycle: filling a senior creative role typically takes 3–6 months of recruiter fees and stalled roadmap before any output exists. We start in days; our published comparison is 20x faster than hiring.

The annualized math is short. In-house: $300K–$800K a year, of which 50–60% is productive time. Our entry retainer: $7,500 × 12 = $90K a year, all of it billed against actual work.

Those aren't hypothetical savings, either. We publish client-specific comparisons versus a comparable in-house creative team: $291K/yr saved (Navis), $394K/yr (Coalesce), and $498K/yr (Saviynt), a 30–70% reduction versus hiring a full creative team. The full breakdowns are on the vs. in-house comparison page, and the in-house cost calculator will price your specific team.

To be fair to hiring: if you have proven, permanent, full-time volume across every discipline and the budget to staff it properly, build the team. That's a real situation. It just isn't most B2B SaaS teams' situation, and we'll say so on a call if yours is the exception.

Freelancers are generally the lowest-cost hourly option, and yes, we cost a little more than hiring freelancers directly. The trade sits in everything the hourly rate doesn't cover. You recruit, vet, brief, and replace each freelancer yourself, and you keep their work consistent with each other's. Each person covers one skill, so a brand refresh plus a website rebuild plus a launch video means coordinating several separate contractors. And availability is never guaranteed: your best freelancer's other client can become your bottleneck, with no bench behind them.

We charge slightly more because the retainer removes that management load. One senior team, one rate, one accountable relationship, spanning creative and web together. That's the "so much more" half of our math: the same buying decision covers four disciplines instead of one.

Where a freelancer beats us: a single, well-scoped project in one discipline, where you have the time and the taste to direct it yourself.

Traditional agencies typically cost more than we do for comparable output, and the engagement itself adds structure you pay for whether or not it helps: account managers between you and the people doing the work, scoping cycles before anything starts, change orders when the brief moves. We're built differently. You work directly with the senior talent doing your work, at one published hourly rate, month-to-month.

An agency earns its premium on large, campaign-style engagements where you want a big bench and full-service strategy. If that's the job, hire one.

Design-subscription services in the Superside class typically start around $15K per month at the enterprise tier, commonly on annual terms with tiered plans. Before signing one, we'd check three things about how this category typically works as of this writing:

• "Unlimited" has a real ceiling. In practice, unlimited-design models tend to deliver roughly 10–20 requests per month depending on turnaround speed.
• Design-only scope. Web development commonly sits outside the subscription, so the website work (often the thing you actually needed) still requires a second vendor.
• "Flexible" often still means a year. Annual commitments, strict tiers, and fees beyond the headline price are common, and you typically work through a PM/CSM layer rather than directly with designers.

At those typical numbers, the entry math is ~$15K/mo × 12 = ~$180K a year for design-only on an annual term. Our entry retainer is $90K a year for design, development, video, and copywriting, cancellable on 30 days' notice.

The subscription model does win at industrial scale: steady, high-volume production design with no meaningful web development requirement is exactly what it was built for.

Our full pricing model:

• $150/hr effective retainer rate, one rate across design, web development, video, and copywriting.
• 50 hours/month minimum ≈ $7,500/mo (Level 1; Levels 2, 3, and Enterprise exist for bigger teams).
• Month-to-month with 30-day cancellation. No long-term commitment, no hidden fees.
• Rollover: unused hours carry into the next month, capped at 100% of that month's retained hours.
• Adjustable: hours flex up or down month-to-month as your workload changes.
• Direct to talent: you work with senior people in your own tools (Slack, Asana, Trello, Notion), with no ticketing queue and unlimited meetings.
• Project rate: non-retainer, ad-hoc work runs $200/hr, which is why the retainer is the better buy for ongoing needs.

How does one team cover four disciplines at one rate? We're open about the mechanics: AI does the production; our named senior creatives do the judgment. You pay for taste and finished work rather than hours of grind, and that's where "so much more, for so much less" comes from.

The fractional model exists for the team in the middle: too much ongoing work for freelancers, not enough proven volume to justify $300K–$800K of in-house payroll, and needs that span both creative and web. We think of the month-to-month term as our accountability model. We have to earn the next month, every month.

50 hours is one dedicated week-plus of senior output, split across whatever the month demands. Because the retainer spans design, dev, video, and copy at one rate, a typical month mixes disciplines rather than buying a single deliverable. Shapes we see often with B2B SaaS clients:

• Launch month: a new landing page designed and built, the sales deck refreshed, supporting social graphics, copy polish across the funnel.
• Content month: an ebook designed end-to-end, infographics pulled from it, email and social assets to promote it.
• Website month: ongoing web design and development sprints in Webflow, WordPress, or HubSpot: new pages, CMS work, conversion tweaks.
• Event month: booth and event collateral, a slide deck overhaul, plus the landing page that captures the leads.
• Brand month: brand-guide refinement, template systems, rolling the refreshed look across key web pages.

Hours move freely between disciplines, so a heavy dev month and a heavy design month cost the same. And because unused hours roll over, a quiet month funds a busy one.

If you need a website, not a retainer

We also publish fixed prices for one-time startup website packages:

• Brand Hero Refresh, $2.5K (credit-able toward a larger package)
• Homepage Sprint, $10K (10 days)
• Scale-Ready Website Design, $20K (20 days; homepage + 5 pages + CMS)
• Logo add-on, $5K

Many teams start with a package, then move to a retainer once the ongoing work is obvious.

• In-house team: $300K–$800K/yr fully loaded, at 50–60% typical utilization, after a 3–6 month hiring cycle.
• Superside-class subscription: ~$180K/yr typical (~$15K/mo × 12), design-only scope, annual terms typical.
• Brightbase entry retainer: $90K/yr ($7,500 × 12) for design + dev + video + copy, month-to-month, hours roll over.
• Freelancers and traditional agencies: costs vary too widely to state a responsible annual number. Directionally, freelancers cost less per hour than we do and traditional agencies cost more.

If your workload is genuinely permanent and massive, hire. If it's one clean project, a good freelancer may be all you need. But if you have steady, multi-discipline creative and web needs and a budget that can't absorb $300K–$800K of payroll, the fractional math is hard to argue with: $150/hr, about $7,500/mo, month-to-month, starting in days. So much more, for so much less. And if it isn't working, you're 30 days from out.

Every plan above is billed at $150 an hour, and every one of those hours is productive time. The calculator works the other side of the comparison: pick the roles you would otherwise hire, set their salaries, your team size and your overhead, and it totals what that team actually costs you — then sets the number against each tier on this page.