How much should I charge to run a done-for-you newsletter for a local business?

One of the things that pulled me into this business was a very young operator who had local businesses paying him $500 a month each to run their newsletters. He didn't write a word. Each business filled out a simple form every week: what item do you want to feature, what do you want to say about it, what's your deal of the week. He pasted the answers into MailChimp and sent it.

"He's still putting the work back on them and they're still happy to pay for it. Right? Because another way to think of the opportunity here is every business should have a newsletter. Why don't they? Because it's too hard."

They don't have time. If businesses will pay for the lazy version, they'll pay a lot more for a good one.

Do business owners actually want this?

Almost every local business owner I've talked to, and that's a lot of them, is interested in having their own local newsletter. You're basically building them their own media company. Now all the local people are paying attention to them, and they can market their business to that audience.

For background on why that works, see how a local business uses a local media brand to win customers.

What should it cost?

I don't have one fixed price, and my numbers have moved as I've done more of these. Here's how my thinking has gone:

When	Price I floated	What it covered
Dec 2024	$500 a month	Client writes it, we support and do minor help
Dec 2024	About $7,000 a month, or $10,000 one-time setup	A full local newsletter pitched to a wealthy realtor or dentist
Jul 2025	About $2,000 a month	Done for you, with one VA handling about four
Jul 2025	About $3,000 a month	Agency-style, on a contract
Sep 2025	$2,500 a month	Done for you, Meta ad spend included

For help running someone's newsletter, I'd say roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a month, depending on scope. Some people say, I'll do it all myself, I just need help with Beehiiv and Meta ads. Others want help every week with content creation and finding events, with my VA searching for events. More work, higher price. At the top end, a prospective client was about to pay me $25,000 to $30,000 for a year of help launching and running one local newsletter. There are a lot of people out there who want that.

My first tier sketch had a middle plan where an overseas writer drafts and an editor checks it, and a premium plan where we hire a local mom in the client's city to write it. A newsletter peer told me to drop the overseas tier. Dentists and chiropractors paying thousands a month will expect no typos. Fair point.

The 2025 math: if one VA can run four of these, $2,000 each is a pretty healthy fee, assuming you can sell a bunch. At the time I was making roughly $1,000 a month in profit per done-for-you newsletter, and it was a lot of work. My takeaway was simple: charge more, and structure the offer so a higher price makes sense.

The value is in the local personality, so for a client who doesn't write I give two options:

1. Write a couple of sections. They write a couple of sections to give it their personality.
2. Pay extra and we hire a local writer. Someone who lives there, like a mom who wants a side gig. While designing this I floated about $5,000 a month for the full version. That was a proposal, not a proven price.

About 80% of the work can be done without being local. The last 20%, the part that makes it authentic, has to come from the client or a local person. For realtor clients I'd define which cities they're allowed to pick from, then put every pick in a shared Notion workspace so they can approve or reject items before anything goes out. A brokerage owner on that call warned that one wrong local pick would make agents cancel.

Should you take equity instead of a fee, and who owns the list?

Newer clients, like insurance agents and a realtor, told me they'd rather pay me to do it than have me own part of it. That's less long-term value for me, so the price needs to be higher.

I've also asked myself whether owning equity in one newsletter in one city will really pay off in some kind of exit. Probably not. A fee you can count on is worth more than a slice of something that may never sell.

The equity deal I proposed to new partners: $2,200 a month, I own 51%, and $1,000 of that goes into Facebook ads so the list keeps growing. If the partner sells ads themselves, that money is theirs. In my two existing partnerships I do 95 to 97% of the work, and the partner sends an intro and some memes. That's a lot of work for the price. I value owning the lists long term. For comparison, one person I asked wanted $2,000 a month just to manage my Facebook ads.

In my done-for-you model, the platform and the list stay in my system. The partner owns the rights and can sell the business, but if they stop paying, it stays with me. The reason: direct access to 10,000 readers is tempting to abuse. A real estate agent who pitches them three times a week kills the audience. Partners who want full ownership push back on this, and it's a real trade-off.

One version flips it entirely: a straight marketing play. A high-value professional pays you monthly, around $2,500 in my made-up example, and you keep owning the brand. They're paying for a marketing strategy, not buying a business. Part of the fee funds Meta ads that grow subscribers you own. A sweetener I've sketched: once the brand's ad sales pass a set level, a share of that revenue brings their payment down.

Should Meta ad spend be included in the fee?

Yes. I don't want to leave growth up to the client. If they're paying me $2,500 a month, about $700 of that goes into Meta ads to grow their list. That leaves $1,800. Take off around $400 for miscellaneous costs and it's still roughly $1,200 to $1,400 a month in profit.

It also kills the most common excuse. A client who puts nothing into ads will tell you it's not working. No wonder. Building the spend in skips that conversation.

Meta ads are the whole growth channel, and I have it dialed in. If you're not doing Meta ads, there's no point in this business, so just make it part of the deal.

On top of that, I'd take about 10% of any ad revenue the client sells through their newsletter.

Why not just sell ads in your own newsletters instead?

Selling ads can get you something like $3,000 per newsletter a month, but it's a treadmill and really annoying. Running the newsletter for a business owner at around $3,000 a month is consistent, and there's a contract. They get all the benefits, and I'm basically doing the business for them.

My plan to find those clients is to get on local business and real estate podcasts. Those listeners hear what I have to say, and the ones who want this reach out.

What about creators and YouTubers?

Big YouTube channels should have newsletters, and most don't. I DM'd one once. He replied that he knew he should, but it's just too hard. I think you could charge $1,000 to $2,000 a month, and I know people who charge way more than that to create newsletters for others.

The work is fast with AI. Nobody wants to sit through a three-hour video, but people want to know what was said. Feed the transcript or the RSS feed into a prompt written in the creator's style and you have a draft in a couple of minutes. Then a person reviews it.

I've also floated a revenue-share version: run a creator's newsletter for free in exchange for a cut of the product sales it drives, with tracking on every link. That's probably not smart short term. Once you know what you're doing, I bet it's a great play.

Services are generally where the big money is. If you don't want to deliver it yourself, ask whether you could charge $1,000 a month and find someone who'd do it for $500. Nothing here is easy or obvious, and it all depends on your market. But it gets easier every year as more of the work can be automated with AI.

How do you launch several clients at once?

Don't start until about 10 clients are lined up, and count a client only once they've paid a deposit to lock in their slot. Otherwise you get 10 people saying "I'm in" and then not doing it. Setting each one up from zero to newsletter and Meta ads ready takes about eight hours, maybe more.

If you offer a subscriber guarantee, measure it over three months, so a short first month can be fixed with a bit more spend in the second. Keep it conservative, something like 2,500 subscribers, because some locations just work out a lot better than others. Watch the calendar too: Meta ads get significantly worse in November and December.

For a version priced for one specific buyer, see what a done-for-you newsletter for real estate agents should cost, or why insurance agents are strong candidates.