What digital marketing actually costs in the Eastern Cape

Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five numbers that do not overlap. That is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when one phrase covers a five-page brochure site and a shop with two thousand products, and nobody agrees which one you meant.

Why almost nobody publishes a price list

The honest reason is that the same words describe genuinely different jobs. “A website” can mean five pages of copy you already have, or it can mean thirty pages that need writing, a booking system, payment, and a migration off something that is falling over. Quoting one number for both means either overcharging the first or losing money on the second.

The less honest reason is that a vague price is easier to move. If the number only appears after you have spent an hour explaining your business, it is harder to walk away from, and easier to adjust upward once the scope “turns out to be bigger than expected”.

You can tell the two apart by asking a simple question: what would make this number go up? Someone pricing honestly will answer immediately and specifically. Someone who has not thought about it will tell you it depends.

What actually moves the number

Four things, in roughly this order of impact.

• Scope, counted in pages and systems. Not “a website” but: how many pages, how many of them need copy written from scratch, and what has to work on them besides text. A contact form is nothing. A booking calendar that syncs to your diary is a different job.
• Whether the content exists. Most quotes assume you will supply copy, photographs and a logo. Most clients do not have them ready. Writing the copy is real work and it is usually the difference between two quotes that look otherwise identical.
• Competition, for anything search-related. Ranking for a term nobody contests is a different amount of work from ranking for one that three established businesses are actively spending on. This is the factor most often left out of a cheap SEO quote.
• One-off or ongoing. A build ends. Search, ads and email do not: they are a monthly commitment or they decay. Comparing a build price against a monthly retainer is comparing two unlike things, and it is worth writing both out over twelve months before deciding anything.

What I publish, and what I do not

Two services here carry a real published range, because they can:

• Email marketing automation runs from R3,000 to R35,000. Where it lands depends on sending capacity, how complex the automation has to be, and the scale of the campaigns. R3,000 and R35,000 are genuinely different builds.
• TikTok monetisation setup starts at R1,500. That covers the assessment and the setup work, not the outcome, because the outcome is TikTok’s decision.

Everything else — SEO, paid media, website design, care plans — gets a fixed price for a fixed scope after a short call. Not an hourly rate that runs, and not a range wide enough to mean nothing. A number, agreed before anything starts, that does not move unless the scope does.

I am deliberately not publishing what other Eastern Cape agencies charge. I have not audited their pricing, and a made-up benchmark is worse than no benchmark. If you want a comparison, get two or three real quotes on the same written brief — which is the only way to compare them anyway.

The three pricing models, and what each one hides

Fixed project price. You know the number before you commit. What it hides is scope: if the scope was written loosely, everything you assumed was included becomes a change request. Ask for the scope in writing and read it as though you were looking for what is missing.

Monthly retainer. Predictable, and it suits work that genuinely never stops. What it hides is what you actually get each month. A retainer without a stated deliverable is a standing order. Ask what specifically arrives every month and what happens to hours you do not use.

Hourly. Honest in principle and hard to budget in practice, because you cannot know the total until it is spent. What it hides is the estimate. If someone quotes hourly, ask for a cap, and ask what happens when the cap is reached.

Ad spend is not agency fees

This is the single most common confusion, and it costs people real money. If you are running Google or Meta ads there are two separate numbers: what the platforms charge for the clicks, and what the person managing the campaign charges for the work. They are not the same and they should not arrive on the same invoice.

Ad spend should be billed by Google and Meta, to an account in your name, on your card. That way you can see exactly what the platforms charged, and the account and its history stay with you if you change who manages it. If someone wants to run ads through their own account and invoice you a single combined figure, you cannot audit the split, and you lose the account’s learning history when you leave.

Five questions worth asking any quote

• What would make this number go up? A specific answer means the scope has been thought about. “It depends” means it has not.
• Is the copy included? The most common gap between a cheap quote and an expensive one.
• Who owns the site, the domain and the hosting account at the end? The answer should be you, in your name, from the start. Anything else is leverage being built in.
• What happens in month two? A build that launches and is never touched again loses ground. Find out what ongoing costs exist before you commit, not after.
• What is the exit? If you stop paying, what do you keep? A good answer is boring: you keep everything, and it is an export and a handover.

What cheap actually costs

The cheapest quote is often a template with your logo dropped into it, copy written in twenty minutes, and no thought given to what anyone searching for your service actually types. It will look fine. It will not sell anything, and you will pay again in eighteen months to have it done properly.

That is not an argument for the most expensive quote either. It is an argument for comparing quotes on the same written brief, so that the number you are looking at means the same thing in each case. Once they are genuinely comparable, the cheapest one is often the right one.

A reasonable way to decide

Write down what you actually need, in one page, before you speak to anyone. How many pages. Whether the copy exists. What has to work besides text. Whether you want this touched again after launch. Send the same page to everyone you ask.

Then compare the numbers, and ask each of them the five questions above. You will learn more from how they answer than from the figure at the bottom.