HUMAN vs ai
I'm on social media every day for work, and I keep seeing the same thing over and over: "Full social media strategy, custom design, monthly calendar, all platforms managed" for $200 a month. Usually from someone "local." Usually, with a guarantee that the price locks in if you stay subscribed, but supposedly “no contract needed”.
Here's the math nobody's talking about.
You can't deliver real strategy, copywriting, design, and actual metric-driven results for $200 a month. It's not possible. Not if you're doing the work. And if you're not doing the work, you're using a bot.
Being local doesn't matter if the content they produce sounds like everyone else's content. Being local doesn't matter if there's no one on the other end critically thinking about your business, your audience, or what moves the needle for you.
But here's what actually makes me salty (pun intended): It's not just a problem for consultants like me who can't compete with that price point.
It's a problem for you.
When someone charges $200 a month for strategy, they train the entire market that strategy is cheap. So when a business owner is ready to invest in real work, they think, "Well, I can get that for $200, so why would I pay more than that?" They've been conditioned to believe strategy has no value.
And the business that hired the $200 agency? They get exactly what they paid for. Content that looks like AI. A calendar with no reasoning behind it. Numbers that don't move. And six months later, they're frustrated, confused, and convinced that social media marketing doesn't work.
It doesn't work because they hired someone who couldn't afford to make it work.
This isn't about being salty at anyone undercutting me. It's about the fact that when you poison the market with unsustainable pricing, you don't just hurt consultants trying to do real work. You hurt the businesses that deserve better. You hurt the entire ecosystem's understanding of what quality costs.
Value doesn't get cheaper. It just gets cheaper looking.
If you're a business owner thinking $200 sounds like a steal, ask yourself what strategy actually requires. Strategy takes time. It takes knowledge of your audience, your industry, and your competitors. It takes testing, oftentimes split-testing. It takes human judgment. It takes someone who actually knows you, not just your content calendar.
If you're a consultant watching this happen: You're not wrong. The market is broken. But you can't fix it by competing on price. You can only fix it by being so clear about what you deliver, and so unapologetic about what it costs, that the people who actually value real work will find you.
Stop defending your rates. Start defending the difference.