How Much Does a Blog Post Cost? Human vs AI-Assisted, With the Math

A blog post written by an in-house writer costs about $211 in labor if it takes four hours, using the median US wage for writers plus benefits. An AI-drafted post costs about $28 if a person spends 30 minutes reviewing it, and $26 of that $28 is the reviewer's time. The tool is the cheapest part of AI blogging. The person who checks the output is the expensive part, and any cost comparison that leaves that person out is selling you something.

That includes ours. Our homepage compares $2,400 a month of manual writing with our $49 plan. Further down we recompute that comparison with review time included, because the honest version still favors automation per post, while the monthly bill at high volume looks nothing like $49.

Key takeaways

• Cost per post = hours of human time x loaded hourly cost + tool cost per post. Every other number in this article comes from that line.
• At $52.83 an hour, a human-written post costs $106 to $317 depending on whether it takes 2 or 6 hours.
• On our Lite plan, the tool costs $1.63 per article if you use all 30. A 30-minute review adds $26.41.
• At 90 articles a month with 30-minute reviews, the review hours alone cost more than the manual budget on our homepage. Each extra article adds review hours, not just output.
• We do not yet have traffic payback data from this blog. Cost per post is only half of ROI, and the other half is still unmeasured here.

Where does the $52.83 an hour come from?

It is the median wage for US writers and authors, grossed up for benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median at $36.98 an hour for writers and authors (May 2025 data, page checked 2026-10-08). An employer pays more than the wage: in the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, wages were 70.0 percent of private-industry compensation costs, with benefits making up the rest.

$36.98 / 0.70 = $52.83 an hour.

Two cautions. The 70 percent is an all-industry average, so it is an approximation for any single employer. And freelancers price by the post or by the word, not the hour, so a freelance quote can land well above or below this. We did not find a freelance rate survey we could verify against its original source today, so we use the wage and tell you to replace it with your own number.

What does a human-written blog post cost?

A human-written post costs its hours times $52.83. The hours are yours to measure: research, drafting, editing, finding an image, and loading it into the CMS all count.

We have not published timing data of our own, so these hours are scenarios, not findings. Time your next three posts from first search to publish button and use the middle one.

What does an AI-assisted post actually cost?

An AI-assisted post costs the tool's share per article plus the reviewer's minutes. Here are both parts for our plans (pricing):

• Tool cost. Lite is $49 a month for up to 30 articles, so $1.63 per article at full use. Pro is $99 for up to 90, so $1.10. Use only 8 Lite articles and the per-article cost rises to $6.13, which is still small.
• Review cost. 15 minutes is $13.21, 30 minutes is $26.41, 60 minutes is $52.83.

A Lite article with a 30-minute review costs $28.05. With a 60-minute review it costs $54.46. The tool is between 3 and 6 percent of those totals.

The review minutes are an assumption, the same way the writing hours are. In our guide to human review of AI content we list what a reviewer has to check, starting with every number and link and every claim about your own business. Whether that takes 15 minutes or an hour depends on how many checkable claims the draft makes, and an article with none is a problem of its own.

What does our homepage comparison leave out?

It leaves out review. The homepage shows manual writing at "8 hrs/week × $75/hr" for $2,400 a month, next to the $49 Lite plan. The $2,400 is 32 hours at $75. The $49 is the subscription with nobody reading the output.

Recomputed with review at 30 minutes per article:

• Lite, 30 articles: $49 + 15 hours x $52.83 = $841 a month, or $28 per article.
• The homepage's 32 manual hours at the BLS rate instead of $75: $1,691 a month, or about 8 posts at 4 hours each, $211 per post.
• Pro, 90 articles: $99 + 45 hours x $52.83 = $2,476 a month, or $27.51 per article.

So per post, the AI-assisted route is still several times cheaper on these inputs. Per month, it is not $49 against $2,400. And the Pro row is the one to stare at: publishing 90 reviewed articles costs more than the manual budget the homepage warns you about, because 45 review hours is more than a full working week. The $75 rate on the homepage also has no stated source, while the $52.83 above does. We have passed both points to the people who own that page.

What does a post that is worth keeping cost?

It costs the whole month's spend divided by the posts that survive review, not by the posts generated. A reviewer who does the job sends some drafts back or kills them, and the minutes spent on a rejected draft still get paid.

Worked example on Lite: 30 drafts, 30 minutes of review each, 10 rejected.

($49 + 30 x $26.41) / 20 published = $42.07 per published post

That is half again the $28 headline figure. If your rejection rate is zero for months, read the section on rubber-stamp review in the guide linked above before you celebrate the low cost.

The next step down the funnel is cost per post that earns traffic. We cannot give you that ratio. This blog started on 2026-09-22 and this is its fourth article, which is too early for search data to mean anything. We will publish it when we have it, flops included, and we suggest treating any vendor's payback timeline with suspicion unless it names the site it was measured on and says how traffic was counted.

When is AI blogging not worth it for a small business?

AI blogging is not worth it when the cheap part of the cost is the only part you can pay. Specifically:

• Nobody has the review hours. At 30 minutes per article, 30 articles a month is 15 hours. If that time does not exist in someone's week, publish fewer articles. Skipping review is how the $28 post becomes a wrong price on your blog.
• You have nothing to add. If the draft can only repeat what the top results already say, cheap production just means more pages with nothing original in them. Google's spam policies (last updated 2026-08-28) describe scaled content abuse as "many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users," and add that this applies "no matter how it's created." Low cost per page makes that easy to drift into.
• Errors are expensive in your field. For health, finance, legal, or safety topics, budget the 60-minute review, or longer, and an expert reviewer. At that point the saving over a human-written post is smaller than the chart at the top suggests.
• One great post would beat ten adequate ones. Some topics need original research or a customer story that no tool can supply. Those are worth the four or six human hours.

It tends to be worth it when you have a backlog of real customer questions with factual answers your team already knows, and someone who can check those answers quickly. That is the case the features were built for.

How do you run this math for your own business?

Fill in four numbers and the formula does the rest:

1. Your hourly cost. Your own wage plus benefits, a freelancer's effective hourly rate, or the $52.83 above if you have nothing better.
2. Writing hours per post if a person writes it, timed on real posts.
3. Review minutes per AI-assisted post, timed on your first five reviews.
4. Your rejection rate after a month of honest review.

Cost per published AI-assisted post = (monthly tool cost + drafts x review minutes / 60 x hourly cost) / published posts.

Compare that with writing hours x hourly cost, and then wait for the traffic data before calling either one a return on investment.

This article was drafted with AI and checked on 2026-10-08 against the linked BLS and Google pages and against our own live site and code. Every figure above was recomputed from those inputs. It stayed unpublished until a person reviewed and approved it.