What you'll actually pay.
Price tracks the depth of the engagement, not a magic hourly rate. Three bands cover most of the market:
| Engagement | Typical 2026 range/mo | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Advisory | $4,000 | Strategy, a few days a month, you execute |
| Embedded most common | $9,000–$15,000 | 1–2 days/week, owns the function and the number |
| Intensive | $20,000–$25,000 | Heavy early load — turnaround, fundraise, or launch |
Most B2B SaaS companies between $25M and $150M ARR land in the embedded band. Cheaper than that usually means advisory — good thinking, but you're still doing the work.
What I charge.
The bands above are the market. Mine sit above them, and the reason is the honest one: the market rate buys a marketing leader. This buys one who builds the systems underneath. RevOps, attribution, answer-engine visibility, and the AI integration that makes the engine run without adding headcount. Everyone sells the transformation; I do the integration.
| Depth | Per month | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Advisory | $4,000 | The floor. Judgment and direction; your team executes |
| One day a week | $10,000 | The plan, the priorities, and the number |
| Two days a week the usual | $20,000 | Own the function, and build the systems under it |
| Three days a week | $30,000 | A rebuild on a deadline, with the systems work running in parallel |
The rate does not fall as the days rise. Most fractional pricing gives you a volume discount, which quietly agrees that you are buying hours. You are not — you are buying judgment, and the third day is the scarcest one I have. The discount is on term, not volume: 10% off a twelve-month commitment, because predictable is worth paying for. Outside a retainer, $350/hour.
Two days a week is $240,000 a year — no equity, no benefits, no ramp, and the systems get built while the function gets run. A full-time CMO is $350,000–$400,000 all-in and starts contributing a quarter in.
Advisory at $4,000 is a real floor, not an opening bid. Below that there is not enough contact time to own anything, and you end up paying for opinions you still have to implement yourself.
The four ways they price.
- 1Monthly retainer. The default and usually the right one — predictable, and it keeps the CMO focused on outcomes, not clock-watching.
- 2Day rate. Flexible, but it caps thinking at the hours you buy and quietly discourages the work that compounds.
- 3Project / fixed scope. Good for a defined job — a rebrand, a launch, an audit. Less good for "own the function."
- 4Hybrid (retainer + outcome). A base plus upside tied to pipeline or revenue. Aligns everyone, but only works when attribution is clean enough to trust.
Fractional vs. full-time math.
A full-time B2B SaaS CMO costs more than the salary. Add equity, benefits, payroll tax, recruiting, and ramp, and the real first-year number is well past the base. A fractional CMO gives you the same caliber of leadership for one to two days a week — so the comparison isn't "cheaper person," it's "same judgment, right dose." The break point is simple: if your stage genuinely needs a full-time leader running a large team every day, hire one. If it needs senior direction and a rebuilt engine — and most companies $25M–$150M ARR do — fractional is both cheaper and faster to value.
You're not buying hours. You're buying judgment.
The mistake is pricing a fractional CMO like contract labor — hours times rate. You're buying twenty years of pattern recognition pointed at your specific problem: which lever to pull first, which spend to kill, which hire to make, what to tell the board. The two days a week are just the delivery mechanism. Priced right, the engagement pays for itself in the spend it stops wasting, before it ever adds a dollar of new pipeline.
What good includes.
- ✓Ownership of a number — sourced pipeline, not a task list
- ✓Direct work with sales, not just "marketing strategy"
- ✓A real operating cadence (weekly, in the business — not a monthly call)
- ✓Authority over budget and vendors, within agreed limits
- ✓A 30/60/90 with what gets assessed, built, and measured
- ✓An exit that leaves your team stronger, not dependent
Where the money leaks.
Two failure modes. You overpay when you buy a strategy deck and a monthly call and call it a CMO — that's advisory pricing dressed as leadership, and nothing gets built. And you underpay into failure when you pick the cheapest day rate, get a few distracted hours, and wonder why the number didn't move. The right spend is the one tied to an outcome you'd actually defend to your board. Anchor on that, not on the hourly.