Pick the marketing team you'd otherwise need to hire, and see the true fully-loaded cost: salary, benefits, recruiting, ramp-up, software, and turnover, next to what specialized agencies typically charge for the same coverage. 10 seconds to an answer; every assumption underneath is adjustable.
Choose the closest fit. Every role, salary and assumption can be fine-tuned in step 4 below.
You've built a custom team, so presets are deselected. Your changes are reflected below.
Click any card to add or remove a role. Type in the salary box to match your market (2026 U.S. averages pre-filled). Use the - / + stepper on selected roles for fractional support: 0.25x = a quarter-time hire.
Base salary is just the beginning. These variables, all defaulted to published industry benchmarks, are what make an internal hire's true cost 1.4-1.8× their salary. Drag any slider to match your organization; the results above update live.
The service areas your team would own, organized by solution area, with the published market rates specialized MedTech & healthcare marketing agencies typically charge. Click a card to add or drop that service (it syncs with your team above). Pick Light / Standard / Aggressive on active services to set the workload. These are industry averages, not Icovy pricing.
Marketing is an investment, not a cost center. Type your own deal size, lead volume and conversion rates below so the ROI, payback and savings figures reflect your business, not ours.
Pick a team above to see your comparison.
Context from published 2026 healthcare-marketing pricing research: organizations structure this 3 ways, and the hybrid model is the most common and most efficient among growth-stage companies.
3 coordinated components. Agency relationships in healthcare are typically built from a core strategic retainer (a flat fee funding senior strategy, planning and coordination, not "hours for hire"), scoped specialist work (SEO & content, creative & branding, web/UX/CRO, physician & B2B referral marketing), and media & distribution (management fees, often a percentage of spend; the ad spend itself is a separate budget).
Projects are additive, not substitutes. Rebrands, major website rebuilds and launch programs commonly land at $50K-$250K+ on top of retainers.
Hybrid pricing dominates. A core retainer plus scoped specialist work lets budgets flex without renegotiating the whole relationship. Performance-based pricing is rare in healthcare: long decision cycles, regulatory constraints and attribution complexity make it risky, and in some cases non-compliant.
4 questions that make any proposal comparable: What's included in the core retainer vs. scoped separately? Which disciplines are priced as ongoing work vs. projects? How are media budgets and management fees structured? Which tools and platforms do you license directly vs. through the agency?
The real cost question. When evaluating any agency fee, the alternative is not $0. It's the fully-loaded internal team above: salaries plus recruiting, onboarding, benefits, tools, management and the ongoing struggle to maintain deep expertise in an evolving channel mix. If a fee seems high, the practical question is whether you could hire, ramp and retain the equivalent bench for less.
Straight answers to the nuances this math surfaces. If you're thinking it, it's probably here.
For a while, yes, and the calculator can model it: one role at $90-120K. The catch is that "marketing" is now 10+ distinct crafts (technical SEO, paid platforms, claims-safe medical writing, motion design, marketing ops), and one person is senior in 2 of them at best. Generalists produce breadth-level work in every channel, burn out covering the gap, and their departure takes all institutional knowledge at once. The realistic pattern: a strong generalist owns strategy and coordination in-house, with specialist depth rented where it's needed. That's the hybrid bar above.
If you need dedicated senior work across multiple service areas, a managed program realistically starts around $10K/month, which is consistent with published mid-tier healthcare retainer data, and scales with markets, service lines and intensity. Below that budget you're buying tactical work: a point-solution retainer (one channel), a project, or advisory hours. Both are legitimate; they're just different products. The calculator enforces this: configure 3+ service areas at full support and the low end floors at $10K/month.
Deliberately excluded from both sides, because you pay media costs whether the work happens in-house or through an agency. Paid-media figures here are management fees only. Budget media separately: B2B MedTech programs commonly run $10K-$50K+/month in spend depending on segment and geography, and management fees are often structured as a percentage of it at higher volumes.
Honestly: at sustained scale. If you have stable, high-volume demand for a craft (a content engine publishing daily, a paid program spending $200K+/month), a dedicated hire beats agency economics for that function. In-house also wins where deep product intimacy compounds daily, which is why product marketing and marketing leadership are usually the wrong things to outsource. The mistake is generalizing that logic to all 10 crafts at once, before volume justifies any single one. Most growth-stage companies sequence it: internal lead first, agency bench for depth, then in-house the functions that hit sustained volume.
Yes, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Someone internal must own direction, approvals and accountability; a good agency reduces coordination load but never to zero. That's why the hybrid bar keeps your most senior role fully loaded in-house, and why the management-overhead slider applies to internal teams. If nobody internal can give an agency 2-4 hours a week of decisions and feedback, fix that before hiring anyone, internal or external.
The expensive risk in MedTech marketing isn't a weak headline, it's an off-label claim in a paid ad. Whoever does this work needs claims-safe writing discipline, regulatory review workflows, and enough clinical literacy to know what triggers scrutiny. Evaluate any hire or agency on this first: ask who reviews claims, how substantiation is documented, and for examples in your device class. Generalist agencies without regulated-market experience are cheap until the first warning letter.
Agency relationships typically carry 30-90 day notice terms: you can rescope, pause or exit inside a quarter. An internal team is the opposite: severance, backfill recruiting, ramp time for replacements, and knowledge that walks out the door. Flexibility has real option value in uncertain markets, and it's a legitimate reason hybrid structures dominate even when raw costs are comparable.
A common sequence: a scoped project first (a strategy sprint, a site rebuild, a launch campaign) to test working chemistry and quality with bounded risk, then a program retainer once trust is established. Projects are additive to retainers, not substitutes; the one-off ranges on each service card above show typical project pricing. If a 90-day tactical engagement can't show directional proof, that tells you something about the partner, or about the offer.
Force them onto the same grid: what's inside the core retainer vs. scoped separately; which disciplines are ongoing vs. projects; how media fees are structured; which tools you license directly; who the actual senior people on your account are (not the pitch team); and what happens at the 90-day mark if results lag. Then compare against the internal alternative using this page's fully-loaded number, never against $0.
Icovy delivers senior, FDA-literate strategy and execution across all of these service areas, without the recruiting risk, ramp time, or overhead of building in-house.
All figures are estimates based on published 2025-2026 U.S. industry benchmarks (salary guides, employer-cost data, and healthcare-marketing pricing surveys). Agency figures represent typical market ranges for specialized healthcare/MedTech agencies; they are not Icovy quotes or pricing commitments. Your actual costs and results will vary by market, seniority, scope, and execution. This tool is for planning purposes only.
Salaries are 2026 U.S. national averages for mid-level talent, drawn from published salary guides (Built In, PayScale, Robert Half, Mondo, and role-specific 2026 guides). Coastal hubs and senior hires typically run 15-35% higher; every salary is editable.
Benefits & payroll taxes default to 30% of base salary: FICA/FUTA/SUTA and workers' comp (~8-9%), health/dental/vision (~7-10%), retirement match (~4%), PTO and other benefits. Published fully-loaded guidance ranges 1.25-1.4× salary before overhead.
Recruiting defaults to 20% of first-year salary per hire (agency fees or internal talent-acquisition cost, job ads, interview time). Range in the literature: 15-25% for professional roles.
Ramp-up defaults to 4 months to full productivity at an average of 50% output during ramp, a conservative default for MedTech, where regulatory and clinical context extends the learning curve. Studies commonly cite 3-8 months for professional roles.
Turnover: average marketer tenure is ~2-3 years; each departure re-triggers recruiting + ramp. We amortize those cycle costs over your tenure setting to a realistic annual figure. Published replacement-cost estimates run 50-200% of salary.
Software & tools default to $6,000/person/year (design, SEO, media, and productivity seats) plus a shared marketing stack (automation/CRM/analytics) defaulting to $30,000/year.
Management & coordination overhead defaults to 12% of payroll: leadership time spent hiring, managing, reviewing, and coordinating, plus the cost of internal misalignment. If you selected a dedicated Marketing PM, consider lowering this.
Agency ranges reflect published retainer and project pricing for specialized healthcare/MedTech marketing agencies (e.g., core strategic retainers typically starting around $10K/month at mid-tier organizations, with per-service point-solution retainers of roughly $2K-$12K/month each). Project work (rebrands, site rebuilds, launch campaigns) is amortized into monthly equivalents. Market-context figures (in-house $400K-$700K+, hybrid $250K-$600K, agency-led $300K-$900K+, and tier investment bands) are drawn from Healthcare Success's 2026 healthcare marketing agency pricing guide.
Program floor: when a configuration implies a dedicated, senior-staffed program across 3+ service areas at full support, we floor the agency low end at $10K/month, consistent with published mid-tier retainer data. Smaller scopes, advisory-only and implementation-only engagements are tactical by nature and are not floored.
Seniority premium: the optional premium slider scales all salary-driven costs; national averages reflect mid-level talent, while senior specialists and coastal hubs typically run 25-35% higher.
Hybrid model: the hybrid bar keeps your most senior selected role fully loaded in-house (strategy, approvals, institutional knowledge) and prices the remaining service areas at agency market ranges, mirroring the lean-team-plus-agency structure reported as most common in the market.
Fractional FTEs: roles can be set from 0.25× to 4× FTE. Fractional loads scale salary, benefits, tools and training proportionally, a simplification, since real part-time hires are often contractors with different cost structures.
Engagement model & scope: agency ranges scale by engagement depth (proactive consulting only at ≈45% of full-service rates, implementation only at ≈75%, A-Z full support at 100%) and by per-service scope: Light (≈70% of the standard range), Standard, or Aggressive (≈140%), reflecting typical volume tiers (e.g., posts per month, pages per month, videos per quarter). One-off project ranges shown on relevant services reflect published project pricing.
ROI model: annual leads × lead→opportunity rate × close rate × average contract value = marketing-sourced revenue. ROI = (revenue − cost) / cost. Payback deals = cost ÷ average contract value. Pipeline-at-risk during hiring = monthly revenue potential × months of hiring + ramp delay, discounted 50% to be conservative.
A one-page, board-ready breakdown of your team's fully-loaded cost, the agency and hybrid comparison, and the ROI math, built from exactly what you configured above.
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