01Time to hire
Six weeks gone before day one
A quarter of lost ground while competitors keep publishing.
42 to 44 days to fill
The salary is the small part. Add weeks to hire, a tool stack, and months of ramp before anything ranks. And one seat still cannot cover content, technical, links and AEO. A desk can.
A job post feels like the cheap, safe move. Then the real bill arrives, and most of it never shows up on the offer letter.
A quarter of lost ground while competitors keep publishing.
Sourcing, screening and onboarding, all paid before a single page ranks.
Ahrefs, Semrush and a content tool. Every month, per seat.
Even a strong hire needs months before the first pages move.
One head holds the context. If they leave, momentum resets to zero.
Four disciplines. One hire is strong at one, stretched across the rest.
Same job to be done: rank, get traffic, turn it into pipeline, and now get cited by the AI engines too. Here is what each route actually costs per month. Switch your region at the top of the page.
That ledger is just one hire. But one person cannot ship the output. 30+ articles a month alone is two writers and a senior reviewing them. Add technical, links and AEO and it is a team of salaries. J6 is one line.
This is the cost that never appears in a spreadsheet. The rules keep moving, and a lone in-house hire has no one to catch what they miss.
The same monthly spend buys very different coverage. This is where the comparison stops being about price and starts being about outcomes.
Alore ran on the desk model: content, technical, authority and answer-engine visibility moving together, not one hire doing their best across all of it. The curve compounded instead of spiking and fading.
Control is real, and for a large company an in-house team is the right end state. The question is timing. Until you can cover four disciplines at once, one seat gives you the feeling of control while the work stays partial. J6 gives you the output now, with reporting you can trace, and many clients bring it in-house later once there is a proven playbook to hand over.
A freelancer is one seat with even less oversight. A cheap agency is usually a content mill priced to look like a bargain, then measured on activity, not outcomes. The comparison on this page is deliberately against a good in-house hire, the strongest version of the alternative, and the desk still wins on coverage and on staying current.
Systems and shared knowledge. Proven playbooks and a shared research library mean the work never restarts from scratch, so senior specialists go much further per hour. Do the arithmetic: a strong writer drafts about one article a day, but with research, editing and the back and forth that is roughly four a week, fifteen a month. The desk ships a minimum of thirty a month, which in-house is two writers and two sets of tools, before anyone has touched technical, links, AEO or senior review. Assembling that team in-house is several salaries, well above the desk price. And because the desk is continuous, the research, writing and performance history stay put, so none of it resets when a person leaves.
Compare like for like. The figure at the top of the page is one loaded seat that still cannot cover content, technical, links and AEO. The desk price is the whole capability, live in two weeks, with no recruiting cost, no ramp, and no single person to lose. Per unit of coverage it is the cheaper line, not the dearer one.
A senior-led team, the same operators behind the named results. You are not handed a junior and a dashboard. We will introduce the people on the strategy call, and everything that ships carries senior review.
Keep them. The desk sits around a good in-house hire and covers what one person cannot: the technical depth, the content volume, the link authority and the answer-engine work, with senior review to catch what a lone seat misses. Your hire stops being a single point of failure.
Book a free 30-minute strategy session. We will map what an in-house team would truly cost you, region and roles included, and show you what the desk would deliver instead.