LinkedIn ghostwriter cost calculator
Ghostwriters run $500–$3,500 a month. Set your posting volume and tier, price your own time, and see the three numbers side by side: hiring it out, doing it yourself, and the software option. No login, runs in your browser.
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Estimates, not quotes: tier bases reflect the typical $500–$3,500/month market range and scale modestly with volume. Real prices vary with writer, industry and scope. For real rates and what each tier includes, read the full ghostwriter cost breakdown.
How to use it
- Drag the slider to how many posts per week you want published, and pick a tier — budget, mid-market or premium.
- Enter your hourly rate and how long a post actually takes you start to finish. Be honest; the DIY column only works if you are.
- Compare the three yearly totals, then read below — because the cheapest column isn't automatically the right one.
What ghostwriters charge, and why the range is so wide
LinkedIn ghostwriters run $500 to $3,500 a month, and that 7x spread exists because "ghostwriting" is two different jobs sold under one name. At the low end you're buying words: a freelancer turns your bullet points or a monthly questionnaire into a couple of posts a week. Mid-market ($1,000–$2,000) usually adds a monthly call, light strategy, and a writer who's done this for people like you before. Premium ($3,000+) is a different product: an experienced writer interviews you regularly, mines the conversations for stories you didn't know were stories, owns your calendar, and writes in a voice your colleagues can't tell from yours.
Volume moves the price less than people expect — the fixed costs are onboarding and voice-matching, so going from two posts a week to four raises a retainer modestly, not proportionally. That's mirrored in this calculator. What raises quotes sharply is scope creep beyond posts: comment engagement, DM handling and strategy work are usually separate line items. We break down real rates tier by tier in the full ghostwriter cost guide.
The DIY cost nobody prices — and when a human is the right call
The middle column is the one most people have never computed. Writing your own posts feels free because no invoice arrives, but three posts a week at 1.5 hours each is 234 hours a year — at $150/hour, about $35,000 of your time, spent on your business's least leveraged activity if writing isn't your edge. Run your real numbers above; the result is usually uncomfortable in one direction or the other.
And the honest counterweight: a great human ghostwriter does things software doesn't. The interview is the product — a skilled writer pulls stories out of you that you'd never surface alone, makes positioning judgment calls, and builds relationships on your behalf. If your personal brand carries serious revenue weight and the premium tier fits your budget, that's a defensible spend, not an extravagance. The comparison in this calculator is about what most people actually get at each price point — and at the budget end, what you get is often generic posts from a questionnaire, which is the part software now does from better raw material: your own voice notes, calls and commits. Once the posts exist, our engagement rate calculator tells you whether they're working.
Building a content budget or make-vs-buy analysis with Claude Code or another agent? Install the skill version — it carries the tier pricing model, the DIY time-cost math, and the when-to-hire-a-human criteria:
npx skills add liftli-ai/skills --skill linkedin-ghostwriter-costPart of the liftli-ai/skills collection — browse all 28 skills, one per tool on this site. For the full pipeline (voice extraction, strategy memory, publishing), connect the Liftli MCP.