Four ways to get a post published, with the real cost of each — including the one everybody forgets, which is what actually kills most content programmes.
Key takeaways
- The published cost of a post is rarely the real cost. Management time is the line nobody budgets and everybody pays.
- In-house writing is the cheapest on paper and the most likely to stop, because it competes with running the business.
- The right comparison is not cost per post but cost per post that actually gets published, twelve months in.
Every clinic that decides to take content seriously runs into the same four options. The price tags are easy to find. The real costs are not, so here they are with the parts that usually get left off.
Option one: a marketing agency
Roughly: $150 to $500 a post, often bundled into a retainer of $1,500 to $5,000 a month that includes other work.
What you get: professional writing, usually a content plan, someone to chase when it does not happen.
The costs not on the invoice: agencies rarely know your profession's advertising rules. Most health regulators' restrictions are unknown to a generalist agency, so the review burden lands back on you, which is the opposite of what you paid for. Volume is also low relative to spend — a retainer at that level usually produces two to four posts a month.
Option two: a freelance writer
Roughly: $80 to $250 a post for someone competent, more for a specialist in health writing.
What you get: better value per post than an agency, and if you find someone good who learns your voice, genuinely good work.
The costs not on the invoice: briefing. Every post needs a topic, an angle, and context, and that comes from you. Reliable freelancers get busy or move on, and the search cost of replacing one is high. Compliance review is still yours.
Option three: writing it yourself
Roughly: free, apparently.
Actually: two hours per post for someone who knows the subject and writes reasonably. At a clinician's realistic hourly value, that is the most expensive option on this page by a distance, and it is being paid in the scarcest currency you have.
The real cost: it stops. Not because anyone decided to stop, but because a fully booked Tuesday beats a blog post every single time. The most common shape of a clinic blog is four posts published in one enthusiastic month, then nothing for two years — which is worse than never starting, because a visibly abandoned blog is its own signal.
The most common clinic blog is four posts from one enthusiastic month in 2023. That is not a budget failure. It is a calendar failure.
Option four: automating the drafting
Roughly: $39 to $99 a month with Riseo, for twenty to forty posts.
What you get: drafts generated from your services and local search data, checked against your profession's advertising rules, delivered for approval, and published to your site once you approve.
The costs not on the invoice — and these are real: your review time. Ten to fifteen minutes a post at the start, less as the voice profile settles. That is not nothing: forty posts a month at ten minutes each is close to seven hours. Most clinics run below their plan limit for exactly this reason, and that is a sensible thing to do.
There is also a ramp. Early drafts sound generically correct rather than like you, and they get better as the system learns from what you change. Anyone promising that the first draft will be perfect is not describing how it works.
A worked example
Take a clinic that wants two posts a week — roughly a hundred a year — and price the same outcome four ways over twelve months.
- Agency at $300 a post: around $30,000, and in practice most retainers at that level will not produce a hundred posts. Realistically you get thirty and the number you wanted was never on the table.
- Freelancer at $150 a post: around $15,000, plus roughly an hour of briefing a week from someone in the clinic. That hour is the part that quietly ends the arrangement around month five.
- In-house: two hundred hours of clinician or manager time. Price that honestly against what an hour of that person is worth and it is the most expensive column here, and it is the one most likely to produce eleven posts rather than a hundred.
- Riseo Pro at $99 a month: around $1,200, plus review time — call it seven or eight hours a month at the start, dropping as the voice profile settles.
The gap is large enough that the interesting question is not which is cheapest. It is whether the cheap one produces work you are willing to put your name on, which is a question about your review process rather than about the tool.
The hybrid most clinics land on
Worth saying, because it is what tends to happen after a few months and it is a good outcome rather than a compromise.
Automated drafting covers the volume — service pages, common questions, seasonal material, the steady weekly cadence. Then a handful of pages a year get written properly by a person: the ones where you are saying something only you would say, disagreeing with your profession's consensus, or explaining an approach nobody else in your city offers.
Those pages are usually the best-performing things on a clinic's website, and they are exactly the pages no automated system will produce for you. Having the routine volume handled is what creates the room to write them.
The comparison that matters
Not cost per post. Cost per post that is still being published in month twelve.
On that measure the in-house option, which looks free, usually delivers the fewest posts of any approach, because it is the only one where the work competes directly with seeing patients. The question worth asking about any of these is not what it costs. It is what makes it survive a busy month.