What $1,997 a month actually buys you in 2026

A general contractor in Mesa called me last month after seeing our pricing page. He had one question: “What am I actually paying for at $1,997 a month? Break it down. Hours. Don’t sell me.” So I did. This is the same breakdown I sent him.

Here’s what your money buys.

The shoot — two to three hours, on site

We drive to your business once a month. It’s not a four-hour photo session. It’s me showing up, scoping the natural light, identifying the three or four scenes that’ll carry the month — a barista pulling a shot, the contractor unloading a truck, the dentist talking through a treatment plan — and shooting the equivalent of 80 to 120 raw stills plus another 15 to 25 video clips.

The shoot is two to three hours of actual on-site work. Round-trip drive from Gilbert to Mesa, Chandler, or Queen Creek adds 30 to 50 minutes each way. Total time burn per shoot, including drive: four to five hours.

Editing — four hours

This is the part nobody sees. We come back with a card full of media that needs culling, color, crop, naming, and folder structure. Out of 120 raw stills, we’ll cut to about 40 finals. Out of 25 clips, we’ll pick six to eight that have a chance at becoming reels, and edit three to four of those into reels with captions and pacing.

Editing is roughly four hours per shoot. If the month is reels-heavy, closer to six.

Scheduling and posting — two hours a week

This is the work nobody romanticizes. You can’t just “post when it’s good.” You write captions that pull through to a clear next step. You pick three hashtags that fit, not thirty bad ones. You queue four to five posts a week into a scheduler that knows when your audience opens Instagram. You verify each post fires correctly on the day. You fix the one that didn’t.

That’s two hours a week. Eight hours a month.

Comments, DMs, reviews — one hour a week

Every post that goes live gets monitored for at least the first 24 hours. Comments get replies within a day. DMs that aren’t spam get a human response. New reviews — Google, Yelp, Facebook — get acknowledged the day they land.

This is closer to one hour per week, sometimes two during a campaign push. Round to four hours a month.

Strategy call — one hour

The first Tuesday of every month, we get on the phone for an hour. We review what worked, what didn’t, and what’s coming up for your business in the next thirty days. If your daughter’s volleyball team is in regionals and you want a post about it, that conversation happens here. If we noticed your Tuesday posts always outperform your Friday posts and want to shift the cadence, we explain it here.

One hour.

The report — one hour

I write you a one-page report at the end of every month. Three or four metrics, three or four observations, one specific recommendation. Not a forty-page deck. Not a dashboard you’ll never log into. A single page you can read while drinking coffee, with the question “what do we do next month?” answered by the bottom paragraph.

That’s one hour to write.

The math

Three to five hours of shoot. Four hours of editing. Eight hours of posting and scheduling. Four hours of community management. One hour of strategy. One hour of reporting. Call it 21 to 23 hours of focused work per client per month.

At $1,997, that’s $87 to $95 an hour for senior creative and account-management work, delivered in person, in Arizona, by the person whose name is on the studio.

Compare that to:

• An in-house social media coordinator at $58,000 a year fully loaded with benefits and payroll tax — about $60 an hour, plus management overhead and hiring time.
• An offshore agency at $3,000 to $10,000 a month for the same 21 hours, billed through an account manager you don’t get to talk to directly.
• A SaaS scheduling tool at $50 a month plus 21 hours of your own time at whatever your time costs.

The middle is where Outpost lives.

The line nobody draws

Most agencies won’t show you this math because the margin is the secret. The cheaper agencies don’t actually do the work — they post templated captions and recycled stock photos and bill you for “social media management.” Eyetracking research from the Nielsen Norman Group found that readers’ eyes slide right past stock imagery and lock onto photos of real people and real places — so the shortcut doesn’t just feel cheap, it goes unseen. The more expensive agencies do the work but bill three thousand a month for the same 21 hours because they have an office tower in Phoenix and an account manager between you and the person actually editing your reels.

We don’t have an account manager. We have a phone number that goes straight to me. We don’t have a margin built around overhead because we don’t have overhead. What you’re paying for at $1,997 is one person’s time, applied carefully, for a month, on your business.

If that math doesn’t work for what you’re trying to do, the call is short. If it does, the next call is yours to set.

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