The honest comparison
Three ways to run your marketing
Every small business does its marketing one of three ways: buy tools and do it yourself, hire people, or hand the whole department to software. Here's what each actually gets you, what each costs, and how automated lead response layers on — no spin.
The three ways
What you get, what you manage
The work is the same seven roles either way — content, SEO, social, email, ads, analytics, and creative. What changes is who does it and how much of your time it takes back.
| Approach | What you get | What you manage |
|---|
DIY tools
$29–$890/mo each | A drawer of point solutions — a writer, a scheduler, an ad tool, an email platform. | Everything. You're the operator gluing them together, every day. |
Hire people
$2,000–$20,000/mo | A freelancer, a fractional CMO, or an agency retainer — real expertise, real hours. | Briefs, reviews, and coordination. You become the project manager. |
Deptzy, managed
$2,900/mo flat | All seven roles, produced from your data on a schedule — done for you. | Only the approvals. Anything outbound waits for your yes; nothing else is on you. |
The difference isn't the output — it's the overhead. DIY hands you the tools and the labor; hiring hands you the labor and the management; Deptzy hands you finished work and one decision: approve or not.
What it costs
A flat number, not a headcount
An SMB multi-channel agency retainer typically starts around $3,500–$5,000/mo — for a slice of an account team. A fractional CMO runs $5,000–$20,000/mo and usually delivers strategy or one person's hours, not full production. Stack a modest tool kit plus one freelancer and you pass $2,900 fast, still doing much of the work yourself.
Deptzy is a flat $2,900/mo, Managed — every seat filled, done-for-you, human-approved, month-to-month. It sits below every human alternative and, unlike a tool stack, doesn't hand the labor back to you.
The short version: below an agency retainer, a fraction of a fractional CMO, and a premium over pure DIY that buys back your time. Add up your own stack in the
pricing worksheet.
The next layer
CRM & automated lead response
Generating content proves lead generation. The bigger win is never letting an inbound lead sit — and that layers cleanly onto the CRM you already use (Zoho, HubSpot, and most others).
- How it wires up: your CRM fires a webhook the moment a lead comes in → the engine drafts a tailored response (email or SMS) → a human approves it, keeping the outbound gate → it sends and logs the activity back to the CRM.
- Effort: most CRMs expose well-documented APIs and no-code flow builders, so a working setup is days, not weeks.
- The gate holds: as with everything Deptzy sends, a person approves each outbound message before it goes. Automation drafts; a human ships.
Recommendation: prove content generation first, then bolt on the lead-response loop as phase two — same engine, one new input.
How to decide
Which one fits you
- Choose DIY tools if you have the hours and genuinely enjoy running the machine yourself.
- Choose hiring if you need a named strategist in the room and have the budget to manage them.
- Choose Deptzy if you want the department's output without the payroll or the project management — and you're happy to approve what goes out.
See it for yourself
See it, price it, onboard it
- The live app: /marketingapp/ — the department console, running now.
- The demo: /demo/ — the end-to-end walkthrough: onboard, approve, go live.
- The pricing brief: /competitors/ — the flat $2,900/mo against 22 real services, with the agency-retainer math.
- Onboarding: /onboard/ — the 3-minute questionnaire that spins up your preview.