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You have four ways to buy marketing. Here is the shape of each.

Hire a senior marketer, sign an agency, buy your team a copilot, or run a marketing function as software. Each one is right for someone. The table below is how we would brief a friend making the call.

Category by category

The four shapes of the decision.

The columns are categories; it is the shape of the decision that matters. Every claim in our column traces to the pricing page and the docs.

	Hire in-house	Agency retainer	AI copilot tools	Tommy & Spartan
What you are buying	A senior person, their judgement and their network.	A team's hours against a brief, on retainer.	Software that helps your team draft faster.	A marketing function that runs as software: specialist agents that do the work.
Who does the work	The hire, once ramped, and the team they build.	The agency's team, briefed and managed by yours.	Your team, operating the tool.	The agents. You set priorities and approve the plans.
Time to first shipped work	Months: the search, the notice period, the ramp.	Weeks, through onboarding and briefing cycles.	Fast for drafts; your team still finishes and ships.	The same afternoon: assessment, brief, first outputs.
Quality control	The hire's own judgement and review habits.	Account review cycles, at the retainer's cadence.	Whatever review process your team runs.	Seven quality gates on every output, before it reaches you.
Measurement	Depends on the stack and habits they bring.	Campaign reporting, cycle by cycle.	Stays with your own reporting.	Read from your CRM: the pipeline attributed to the work.
Cost shape	$300–500K a year for a senior CMO, plus the ramp.	A monthly retainer, scoped in hours.	Per-seat subscriptions, plus your team's time.	From US$299 a month, metered by use.
When it is the right call	You are scaling past the point where founders should run marketing, and can wait for the ramp.	You need a defined campaign delivered and have someone to manage it.	You already have a capable team and want it faster.	You want the function itself: work shipped, gated and measured, from day one.

Want the version with a senior partner in the room? That track is The Founding 20 and the Operating Retainer.

You have four ways to buy marketing. Here is the shape of each.

The four shapes of the decision.

Test the fourth column free.