The honest answer is a wide range, and anyone who gives you a single number is selling at that number.
We read three public pricing guides on 22 September 2026, each published by a business that sells in this market, so treat them as the industry quoting itself rather than as neutral research. Even allowing for that, they agree more than they disagree.
The three tiers everyone describes
At the entry end, $500 to $1,500 a month buys roughly 8 to 12 posts. That is usually a freelancer, often early in their own career, working from a monthly interview call.
In the middle, $2,000 to $5,000 a month buys 12 to 16 posts with voice matching and a content calendar. This is where most funded founders land.
At the top, $5,000 to $15,000 and up buys 16 to 20 or more posts, usually from an agency with a strategist, a writer and an editor attached.
Per post, the same guides quote $50 to $100 at the budget end, $150 to $250 in the middle, and $300 to $500 premium. The per-post numbers are a useful sanity check on the retainers: a $3,000 retainer for 12 posts is $250 a post, which sits exactly where the mid tier says it should.
Four things move the number
Volume. The obvious one, and the least interesting. Going from one post a week to one every weekday roughly triples a freelancer retainer, from around $500 to $700 up to $2,500 to $3,500.
How much interviewing they do. This is the real cost driver and the one founders underestimate. A writer who runs a 45-minute interview every week produces noticeably better material than one working from a shared doc, and they charge for the hour.
Whether strategy is included. Positioning, pillars and a calendar are a different service from writing, and agencies price them in. If you already know what you want to be known for, you are paying for something you do not need.
Whether they also run the account. Scheduling, replying to comments and engaging on other people's posts are often a separate line, and they are usually the line that quietly doubles.
What the money buys that software does not
Worth saying plainly, because we sell the alternative.
A good ghostwriter brings craft: hooks, structure, and the cut that makes a rambling story land. They bring an outside view of your positioning that you cannot get from inside your own company. And they bring the thing most founders are actually buying, which is an obligation to somebody else. A standing Tuesday call gets a post written in a way that no tool has ever managed.
If you want a book, a keynote or a bylined essay in a real publication, hire a person. That is a different craft from a post and no amount of software substitutes for it.
What the fee cannot buy
Two things, and no retainer size fixes either.
They were not in your meetings. A briefing call is their source. The Tuesday call where a client's COO said the one line that would have made the post, the Thursday thread where the team split, the number you finally saw on Friday: those reach the writer only if you carried them to an interview a week later, in whatever order you happened to remember them. Most of a founder's best material never makes that trip.
The voice is theirs, written as you. A skilled writer gets close, and the calibration month exists because close takes work. Readers who know you will still sometimes hear the seam, and you will read every draft with that ear.
The comparison that matters
Set the numbers against the thing you are actually buying. At the mid tier you are paying somewhere near $250 a post for work built on a weekly interview, produced by someone who was not there when the interesting thing happened.
Sonar is $99 a month for both LinkedIn and X, and it takes a different route to the same problem: it reads the week you already had, from the tools where the work happens, and drafts from what actually occurred rather than from what you remembered to mention. You approve every post before anything publishes.
It is not the same product. A ghostwriter will out-write it on a keynote and will hold you accountable in a way software cannot. But if the reason your posts are generic is that the good material never made it to the interview, the fee is not solving that problem, and a bigger fee will not either.
The full side-by-side, with the sources for every number above, is on Sonar beside a LinkedIn ghostwriter.
Sources
All read on 22 September 2026. Windmill Growth, "How much does a LinkedIn ghostwriter cost in 2026?" (published 2 February 2026), plus two further public pricing guides cited in full on the comparison page. Each publisher sells into this market, which is stated there as well as here.