Cost
Outsource blog writing: what it actually costs.
A per-post price is the smallest part of the bill. What decides whether outsourcing is worth it is the work around the draft — the brief, the review, the links, the publishing — and almost all of it stays with you. Here is what sets the number, and what the quote leaves out.
What the market charges, where it is published.
Per-word rates read from each supplier's own pricing page in October 2026. These are list prices for writing alone — not for the plan, not for publishing, and not for the review afterwards.
| What you are buying | Published rate | What comes with it | Where we read it |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI-assisted per-word service | $0.06 / word | Plus a $49.50/month platform fee, 1–3 day turnaround | Verblio pricing page |
| 100% human per-word service | $0.16 / word | No platform fee, subject-matter writers, unlimited edits | Verblio pricing page |
| Agency per-word plan | From $0.08 / word | Monthly subscription discount, unlimited revisions | WordAgents pricing page |
| An AI writer that posts into your CMS | $13 – $99 / month | A word or article quota you can exceed | Each vendor's own page, on /vs |
| Xt4b | 20€ / site / language / month | Plan, writing, images, hosting and publishing | Our pricing page |
The same post, in each column
A 1,500-word post is about $90 at the hybrid rate, $120 at the agency rate and $240 at the human rate — and the same 20€ on Xt4b whether the post is 1,200 words or 2,400. Survey-based freelance medians, if you want them, are published by the Editorial Freelancers Association.
What sets the price when you outsource blog writing.
This is also the list to bring to a quote conversation: ask what the writer is assuming about each one.
- Research depth
- A post assembled from what already ranks costs an hour. A post that needs the SERP read, the existing pages mapped and your product understood costs a day. Same word count, different product.
- Subject expertise
- In anything regulated or technical — clinical, legal, financial, developer — the writer has to either have the knowledge or buy it from you in interviews. That interview time is the real cost of specialisation, and it is why those posts are never cheap.
- Language and market
- Planned-in-language costs more than translated, because it needs someone who searches in that market rather than someone who speaks it. Machine translation into a second language is cheap and obvious to the reader of that language.
- Revisions
- The rounds are where the hours actually go, and where a fixed per-post price turns into a negotiation. Agree the number of rounds in the brief, not after the first draft comes back.
- Whether it has to rank
- Filler is priced per word; a page with a query, an intent and internal links behind it is priced as work. If the brief does not say which query and what the page is competing with, you are buying the first one at the price of the second.
Three ways to buy the words.
Each one puts the risk somewhere different. The page on pricing models covers them in full; this is the outsourcing question — who carries the variance.
Per post
- Budgets cleanly and pushes the research risk onto the writer, which is why a well-scoped brief gets a better price than an open one.
- Rewards speed: the payment is the same whether the SERP was read or not, so the incentive is to write, not to check.
- Works best for a series of similar posts where the tenth needs the same work as the first.
Per word or per hour
- Transparent and easy to compare between writers, which is exactly why it is the default for freelancers.
- Per word pays for padding; per hour pays for slowness, and neither pays for the query being right.
- Needs someone on your side who can judge whether the work was good, because the invoice says nothing about it.
Or a flat line per site and language
The third model is what a subscription buys: a fixed 20€ per site and language a month, whatever the cadence, with the plan, the writing and the publishing included. It removes the per-post variance — and with it the incentive to write anything that does not need writing — at the cost of giving up line-by-line control over the drafts. Approval is the setting that decides how much control you keep. The three models, compared.
Where a person is still the right buy.
This page is not an argument for replacing writers. It is an argument for knowing which posts you are buying writers for.
The posts that need a person are the ones where the value is the perspective: a case study with real numbers, an opinion your founder is willing to defend, a clinical or legal page that has to be signed off by someone qualified, a piece that only works because it is genuinely first-hand. Those are worth several times what a searchable question-and-answer post is worth, and they should be bought deliberately rather than as part of a per-post quota. Xt4b writes the other kind — the queries your site is missing, answered plainly and published on dates — and leaves the budget for the posts that need you.
Questions about the number.
Four that come up whenever the quote is higher than expected.
Why are quotes for the same article so far apart?
When you outsource blog writing, the word count is the only thing that is comparable — and it is the least important input. Two quotes for a 1,500-word post can be an order of magnitude apart and both be fair: one is a rewrite of what already ranks, the other is an hour of research into a subject the writer does not know, plus a conversation with your product person, plus two rounds. Ask what is included in the research and how many revisions are, and the spread starts making sense.
Should I pay per post or per word?
Per word rewards length, which is the wrong incentive: it pays a writer to pad. Per post fixes the budget and pushes the risk of research onto the writer, which is fine for a well-scoped brief and unfair for an open-ended one. If you must choose one, per post with a word range in the brief is the least distorted.
What does the brief cost me?
The part nobody invoices. A brief that a writer can follow without asking questions — the query, the intent, the outline, the entities, the internal links, the tone — is usually an hour of someone senior, which at agency rates is often more than the draft. That is the hidden argument for a system that produces the brief as a by-product of the plan.
Is AI-written content a false economy?
It is a false economy when it is unreviewed and answers a query you already cover, because you then pay again to fix or delete it. It is not when there is a plan behind it and a review in front of it. The honest test is not who wrote the draft; it is whether the page is the best answer to the query it targets.
Nothing on this page is a promise of rankings, traffic or revenue — those are not guaranteed whoever writes the post. What is guaranteed is what gets published and the date it goes out.
Related.
The process side of the same decision, and the same question in other markets.
- Outsourcing SEO content without losing brand voice — the brief, the voice guide and the red lines, if you are hiring writers.
- What SEO content costs — the three pricing models and what moves each one.
- Ile kosztuje artykuł SEO (Polish) — stawki i co kształtuje cenę tekstu.
- ราคาเขียนบทความ SEO (Thai) — the same question for the Thai market.
More on content
- What SEO content costs
The three pricing models, and what actually moves the number.
- Content retainer pricing
Four models, where the margin goes, and how to make the line defensible.
The cheap half of the work
Buy the answered questions as a line, not a post.
20€ per site and language a month covers the plan, the posts and the publishing — the part where the price is decided by word count. Keep the budget for the pieces only you can write.
20€ / site / language / month3 days free, no card