Ask three people what a blog post should cost and you will get three answers between fifteen dollars and six hundred. None of them will explain the gap. So here is the gap, with actual numbers, and an honest account of what you get at each price.
The short answer
In New Zealand in 2026, a single blog post costs roughly $250 to $600 from a freelance copywriter, $800 to $2,500 a month from an agency on retainer, $30 to $80 from an overseas content mill, and $5 to $30 from an AI writing tool. The prices differ by a factor of a hundred because they are not the same product, and anyone comparing them on price alone is going to be disappointed by whichever one they pick.
A freelance New Zealand copywriter: $250 to $600 a post
This is the going rate for someone who writes for a living, has read your website, and can hold a phone conversation about your business. At the lower end you are getting around 800 words on a topic you supplied. At the upper end you are getting research, interviews with your team, and someone who will push back when your brief is wrong.
That price sounds high until you do the arithmetic on their end. A good post takes a professional four to six hours once you count the brief, the research, the draft, and the revision. At $600 that is roughly $100 an hour before tax, GST, ACC levies, unpaid admin, and the weeks between contracts. It is a fair rate, not a rort.
Worth it when: the page is genuinely important — a service page, a launch, a piece that has to represent you properly. Also worth it when your industry is technical enough that getting a detail wrong would cost you credibility with the exact people you are trying to reach.
The problem: at $400 a post, publishing fortnightly costs you $10,400 a year. Most New Zealand businesses under about fifteen staff cannot justify that against a channel that takes a year to prove itself.
An agency retainer: $800 to $2,500 a month
You are usually buying two to four posts a month plus some combination of strategy, keyword research, social snippets and a monthly report. The good ones are genuinely good — they will connect your content to your actual sales pipeline in a way no individual writer can.
Read the contract carefully, though. Three things trip people up. Minimum terms are commonly six or twelve months. Pause clauses often do not exist, so a quiet quarter still costs you full freight. And "four posts" sometimes means four items of content, one of which is a LinkedIn post.
Worth it when: you have someone internally who can feed the agency information, and enough revenue that $18,000 a year is a line item rather than a decision.
Overseas content mills: $30 to $80 a post
You will find plenty at this price and the writing is often technically fine — correct grammar, sensible structure, reasonable length. The trouble is everything underneath that.
A writer in another country does not know that a sleepout needs consent, that the busy season for your trade runs October to March, or that nobody here says "HVAC". They will use American spelling unless you specify, and sometimes even then. Most importantly they have no idea which questions your customers actually ask, so you end up with a well-written article about a topic nobody searches for.
Worth it when: the topic is genuinely international and factual — a technical explainer, a product comparison, a definitions piece. Not worth it for anything where being a New Zealand business is the point.
AI writing tools: $5 to $30 a post
This is the range we operate in, so read this section with that in mind.
The honest position is that AI writing tools vary enormously and the price tells you very little. A raw chatbot will give you eight hundred generic words for nothing. What you are paying for in a purpose-built tool is everything around the writing: whether it read your actual website, whether it researched real search phrases before it started, whether it linked back to the page you want enquiries for, and whether you can see afterwards which posts did anything.
What you are not getting at this price, from anyone, is a writer who understands your business better than you do. Every AI-assisted draft needs a human read before it goes live — not because it will be badly written, but because it might be confidently wrong about a detail only you would catch.
Worth it when: you need volume and consistency more than you need brilliance. Twenty decent posts covering twenty real customer questions will bring in more work than three beautiful posts about topics nobody searches for.
The cost nobody quotes you
Every one of these options has the same hidden line item: your time. Even the $600 copywriter needs a brief, needs your feedback, and needs someone to say yes before publishing. Budget an hour of your own time per post regardless of who writes it, and price your own hour honestly when you compare options.
The other hidden cost is publishing. A post sitting in a Google Doc is worth nothing. If getting content onto your website requires emailing your web developer and waiting three days, that friction will quietly kill the whole programme within four months. It always does.
What we would actually recommend, by size
- Sole trader or small trade business: start cheap and frequent. Twelve to twenty posts a year answering real customer questions will do more than four polished ones. You are buying coverage of search terms, not literature — we have written out the stripped-back version of this for businesses with no spare time.
- Established local business, five to twenty staff: a mix. Use a copywriter for your three or four most important pages, and something cheaper for the long tail of questions around them.
- Business with a real marketing budget: an agency or an in-house writer, with AI tools used by that person to draft faster rather than to replace them.
- Web design or hosting company: whatever you use, it has to work across many client sites without you touching each one. That constraint matters more than the per-post price.
The question to ask before you spend anything
Not "how much per post" but "which page am I trying to get more enquiries for?" A post that exists to fill a content calendar is a waste of money at any price. A post that answers the question someone types the night before they ring a business like yours, and links to the page where they can do that, pays for itself the first time it works.
If you cannot name that page, you are not ready to buy blog writing yet — from us or from anyone.