An outsourced creative department, priced like a line item
An outsourced creative department is one retained team doing what an internal department would: design, web development, video and copywriting, with senior production management included. Ours costs $150/hr, about $7,500/mo at the 50-hour minimum, so $90K a year where the fully loaded in-house version runs $300–800K. Month-to-month, 30-day cancellation.
The department math
Two numbers decide this category, and both are published.
The first is the fully loaded cost of the internal version: $300–800K a year in salaries, benefits, tools and management for a creative team of any real breadth. The second is utilization. A typical in-house team spends 50–60% of paid time actually producing; the rest goes to meetings, admin, and training. So the cheap end of that range buys you roughly $150–180K of productive output for $300K spent.
Our entry retainer is $90K a year, and every one of those 600 hours is billed work. That gap is where the published client figures come from: Coalesce saves $394K a year against a comparable in-house team, Saviynt $498K, NAVIS $291K, SourceWhale $161K. The published summary across clients is 30–70% saved versus hiring a full creative team.
What the department covers
The point of buying a department rather than a service is that you stop caring which discipline a request belongs to. One pool of hours absorbs all of it, at one rate.
Design
Logos and full branding, brand guides, landing pages, slide decks, ebooks, infographics, event brands.
Web
Design and development in Webflow, WordPress, and HubSpot, from single landing pages to full redesigns and custom micro-sites.
Video and copywriting
The launch video and the words on the page, from the same team that built the page.
Production management
A senior PM with 15+ years runs the traffic, inside your Slack, Asana, Trello, or Notion.
The bench behind that list: a creative director, a senior developer with 15+ years, the senior PM above, and a senior designer with 12. Four disciplines, four senior people, one rate. How we staff seniors at $150/hr is published and simple: AI does the production, our named senior creatives do the judgment.
Agency of record, in practice
“Outsourced department” sounds theoretical until you look at what one actually shipped. Saviynt has kept us as agency of record for over 4 years and 10,000+ served hours. In that time the department’s output covered a brand evolution, a full website redesign, ad campaigns, multiple event brands, and custom-developed micro-sites, and the company raised $205M on the NYSE after the brand update, through years of consistent double-digit growth.
NAVIS is the other long agency-of-record run: 3+ years, 8,000+ hours, including a rebrand that shifted the brand’s archetype while keeping their well-established logo, finished before Revinate acquired them.
Both ran on month-to-month terms the entire time. A department you can cancel with 30 days’ notice has to re-earn the job every month, which we consider a feature of the model rather than a risk in it. Both case studies are published under our work.
What we’d tell you to keep in-house
Not everything a creative department does should be outsourced, including to us. Two things belong on your side of the table.
The final vote on brand decisions.
The customer knowledge underneath those decisions.
Everything else on the org chart — the producing, building, editing, and shipping — is exactly what a monthly retainer is built to absorb.
