Marketing consultant pricing is deliberately opaque. Most consultants don't publish rates because they want to get you on a call first. I understand why — but it's also frustrating if you're trying to figure out whether you can afford this before committing time to conversations.
Here's an honest breakdown of the market.
Hourly Rates
Experienced marketing consultants typically charge $150–$400/hour. Where someone falls in that range depends on specialization, track record, and geography (US rates tend to run higher than Canadian).
Junior consultants or generalists are often in the $75–$150 range. Senior specialists — someone who has led growth at a Series B SaaS company and now consults — might be at $350–$500. Those rates are less common but they exist, especially for deeply specialized work like enterprise positioning or M&A marketing due diligence.
Hourly is the least common billing model among experienced consultants, for a reason: it creates bad incentives. The consultant is paid for time, not outcomes. The client watches the clock instead of engaging with the work. And hourly billing tends to reward inefficiency — someone who takes twice as long makes twice as much.
Most consultants who started on hourly rates have moved away from it.
Project-Based Pricing
This is the dominant model for well-defined engagements. You agree on a scope, a deliverable, and a fixed price. The consultant takes the risk on hours; you get price certainty.
Real ranges by project type:
- Marketing audit or diagnostic: $1,500–$8,000 depending on depth and business size
- Positioning and messaging work: $5,000–$20,000 for a full engagement with customer interviews
- Channel strategy and media plan: $4,000–$15,000
- Marketing systems buildout (attribution, CRM setup, reporting): $8,000–$30,000
- Full go-to-market strategy for a product launch: $15,000–$50,000+
These numbers assume solo or small-team consultants, not large consulting firms. McKinsey or Deloitte Digital will charge multiples of this.
Project pricing works well when the scope is well-defined. It breaks down when the client keeps adding to scope mid-engagement — which is why defining deliverables precisely at the start matters.
Retainer Pricing
Monthly retainers typically range from $3,000–$15,000/month for an independent consultant. What you're buying varies: some retainers are advisory-only (a few hours of calls per month), others include hands-on work like writing, campaign oversight, or systems management.
Retainers make sense when you need ongoing strategic support — a regular thinking partner who stays close to your business. They make less sense if what you actually have is a discrete project that needs to get done. Many retainers are sold to clients who would have been better served by a focused project engagement.
If a consultant is pushing you toward a retainer before you've worked together, ask what specifically is delivered each month and how you'd evaluate whether it's worth continuing.
What Jagatjeet Charges
I'll be direct about this because I think pricing transparency is more useful than the standard "let's talk to see if we're a fit" non-answer.
The entry point is the Diagnostic — a structured audit and diagnosis of your marketing system, delivered as a written report with a prioritized action plan. This is fixed at $1,500.
It's scoped to give you a clear picture of what's working, what's broken, and what to address first — without committing to a larger engagement. Some clients do the Diagnostic and then handle implementation themselves. Others move into a project-based engagement for the next phase.
Full project engagements are priced by scope. Most fall in the $5,000–$20,000 range depending on complexity. I don't do open-ended retainers as a default model — not because retainers are bad, but because they work better once there's an established working relationship and a clear reason for ongoing engagement.
More detail at /work-with-me.
What Actually Determines Value
The rate matters less than the return. A $10,000 consultant engagement that correctly diagnoses why your $80,000/year in paid ads is generating low-quality leads is a good investment. A $3,000 engagement that produces a report you can't act on is not.
When you're evaluating a consultant, the right questions are:
- What specifically will I have at the end of this engagement?
- How will I know whether it was worth it?
- Have you worked with businesses at my stage and in my category before?
Credentials matter less than track record. Ask for specific examples of problems they've solved, not just client logos.
If you want to understand what this type of work actually looks like before committing, the Diagnostic is designed for exactly that. It's a low-risk way to see how I think and whether the approach makes sense for your situation.
Background on how I work at /marketing-systems-consultant and /about.