Agency, freelancer or in-house for landing pages

For one landing page, hire a freelancer. For a page that needs customer research, a copywriter, a testing plan and someone to run all three, hire an agency. Hire in-house only when you ship pages and new versions every week of the year, because that is the only volume that pays back a salary.

What you are really paying for

A freelancer sells you their own hands for a set number of days. An agency sells you a system: strategy, project management, quality checks and a bench of people, so the work keeps moving when one of them gets sick. An in-house hire sells you availability, and availability is the most expensive thing on this list. Every argument about which model is better is really an argument about how much of that system this one page needs.

When a freelancer is the right call

You get one person, one email address you can hold to account, and nobody turning your feedback into a brief. You talk to the person moving the pixels. Turnaround is faster because there is no internal review layer. The price is lower because you are not paying for an office, a sales team or a bench of staff. For a single campaign page or a launch page, this is usually the right call.

Where it breaks is capacity and cover. A freelancer with three clients and the flu is a freelancer who misses your launch. If the job needs design, copy and code, you have just become the project manager for three contractors, and the gaps between them are your problem. Ask what happens if they are unavailable in launch week. A vague answer means that risk is yours.

When an agency earns its fee

An agency is worth the extra cost when the stakes justify it. Think of a funded launch, a rebrand, or an ad budget big enough that a two point lift covers the fee several times over. You get research, more than one version to test, and a copywriter who does this full time. You also get someone whose whole job is keeping the project moving while you do yours.

Where it breaks is who does the work. Senior people pitch, junior people build, and you find this out at the first design review. Ask which people will be on your project, by name, and ask to see their own work rather than the agency showreel. It is also fair to ask how many of the case studies on the site were made by people who still work there.

The in-house maths

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for web and digital interface designers at 98,090 USD as of May 2024. Add payroll taxes, software, hardware, benefits and the time you spend managing them, and the real number is higher. Then ask the awkward question. How many landing pages will that person build this year? If the honest answer is eight, you paid roughly twelve thousand dollars a page for someone who spent most of the year on internal slide decks.

In-house wins on context. A designer who sits in your standups knows the product, the objections and the last three campaigns without being briefed, and that adds up over a year. It is genuinely valuable when the volume is there and dead weight when it is not. Volume is the whole test.

The hybrid most teams land on

One in-house designer or marketer owns the brand, the assets and small edits. An outside specialist gets pulled in for the pages that carry money: the paid traffic page, the launch page, the pricing page. The salary stays justified, and the high stakes work goes to someone who builds landing pages every week instead of four times a year.

How to pick for your landing pages this week

Count the pages you will really ship in the next twelve months. Under ten, hire a freelancer or a small specialist studio, priced per project. Ten to forty with real ad spend behind them, put one specialist on a retainer, or use an agency if you also need research and copy. Above forty, plus ongoing brand work, start hiring. Then run one filter before you sign anything. Whoever you pick should be able to say the conversion goal of your page back to you before they quote a number. If they quote first and ask later, they are pricing a layout, not a result.