What restaurant social media actually costs in 2026
2 min read
Most agencies will not put a number on their site. Here are the real ones.
What the market charges, per month, for one location
| Level | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Freelancer or junior agency | $500 – $1,000 |
| Standard agency retainer | $750 – $2,000 |
| Mid tier with ad management | $1,800 – $3,500 |
| Enterprise or multi-unit | $5,000+ |
| Cheapest restaurant-specific service advertised publicly | $399 |
What you are actually buying at each level
Under $500 usually means a freelancer, scheduled posts, and your own photos. It works if you already have good photography and a clear idea of what to say. It stops working the first busy week you forget to send them anything.
$750 to $2,000 is the standard agency retainer. You get a content calendar, someone else posting, and a monthly report. You are paying for coordination as much as creation — account managers, approval rounds, revisions.
Above $2,000 buys ad management, more platforms, and often influencer coordination. It makes sense when paid spend is doing the heavy lifting and the organic account supports it.
The part nobody puts on the page
At every tier above the freelancer, you are still the bottleneck. The agency needs photos. The agency needs to know what is on special. The agency sends drafts you have to approve, and they sit unread while you are on the line during a Friday dinner rush.
That is why restaurant social media stalls. Not budget — attention. The month you get busy is the month the account goes quiet, and a quiet account is worse than none, because a guest checking whether you are still open sees three weeks of silence.
What we charge, and why it is different
KRZY Media Lab starts at $69 a month.
We can do that because the work is not a retainer with meetings attached. You send photos when you have them. We edit them — real food you actually serve, never AI-generated — write captions off your real menu, and post to Instagram and Facebook on a schedule. A real person hand-approves every post against your mood board before it goes out.
The difference is not that we found a cheaper way to do agency work. Most of what an agency bills for is coordination, and we removed the coordination.
How to decide
Do it yourself if you or someone on your team genuinely enjoys it and has thirty minutes a day. The best restaurant accounts are usually run by an owner who loves the food. Nothing beats that.
Hire an agency if you are running paid campaigns, opening multiple locations, or need strategy rather than posting.
Hire us if the account keeps going quiet because you are busy running a restaurant. That is the specific problem we built this for.