I can spend about ₹35,000 a month on marketing. Is an agency worth it, or should I do it myself?

This question came up three separate times on Reddit this week, and the answers were more useful than anything I have read on an agency blog. The short version is that ₹35,000 a month is a real budget, but it is not an agency budget, and spending it as one is how most founders lose six months.

Below is what agency people themselves said that money buys, what to check before you hire anyone, and the specific tests that separate a useful proposal from a polished one.

Quick answer if you’re skimming

• At roughly ₹30,000–45,000 a month you are buying about 3–6 hours of an experienced person’s time, or 2–4 articles. That is a freelancer’s budget, not an agency’s.
• Check your tracking before you hire anybody. A large share of “our performance collapsed” posts this week turned out to be a broken pixel or a dead purchase event, and that costs nothing to verify.
• Boosting posts is not cheap advertising. It is a different product that sells you likes. One person spent about ₹18,000 on boosts and got 1,000+ likes and zero users.
• Judge proposals on specificity, not polish. Ask what they would do in month one and month two. Vagueness is the signal.
• An agency retainer makes sense when you already have one channel converting at a known cost and the problem is volume, not knowledge.

What does ₹35,000 a month actually buy at an agency?

• Someone who works at an agency put it plainly: roughly 3 to 6 hours of an experienced person’s time per month.
• Another commenter: “at 350-500 a month you’re buying 2-4 articles, whatever the agency calls it.”
• An agency owner in the same thread named his own floor — minimum $3,000 a month (roughly ₹2.6 lakh), plus a setup fee of $750 minimum (roughly ₹66,000).
• So the honest framing is not “which agency at ₹35k” but “what is the single most valuable thing one competent person can do in four hours a month”.
• Figures above are from commenters, in USD; rupee equivalents are approximate at about ₹88 to the dollar.

So should I hire a freelancer instead?

• That was the near-unanimous answer: “at $350-500 you’re looking at a freelancer. Agencies cost a lot more than that.”
• A freelancer at this budget works if the job is narrow and written down. “Improve my SEO” is not a job. “Rewrite and internally link my twelve highest-intent pages” is.
• The counter-view, also from the thread: “Best to pay for a SEO course and diy it for that budget if I’m completely honest.” For a founder with four spare hours a week, that is genuinely competitive.
• The blunt version someone else offered: “If you pay with peanuts, you get monkeys.” Both things are true — the budget is real, and it buys one person, not a team.

What should I check myself before I hire anyone?

• Whether your tracking is telling the truth. This is free and takes an afternoon.
• From a commenter on the “did my ads break” threads: did CAPI break, did someone touch the pixel, did a Shopify app update kill your purchase events — because then you still pay for every click and the dashboard shows you nothing.
• Compare three numbers for the same week: clicks the ad platform reports, sessions your analytics records, and actual orders or enquiries in your own records. In r/PPC this week people were reporting 25–30% gaps between platform clicks and real sessions.
• If those three numbers disagree badly, fix that first. An agency hired on top of broken tracking will bill you for months of noise and both of you will believe the reports.

My ads got likes and followers but nobody signed up. What went wrong?

• You optimised for the cheapest thing in the auction. The best answer in that thread: “Your $200 bought exactly what you optimized for: cheap social approval. Likes and follows are the cheapest signals in the auction… Likes never became a user.”
• The actual spend was about ₹8,800 on Instagram and ₹8,800 on TikTok at roughly ₹900 a day, on reach and boost objectives. Result: 1,000+ likes, a few hundred followers, zero users — and the followers then began dropping off.
• The replacement suggested was a conversions campaign at about ₹1,800 a day for three days, pointed at one measurable event that actually pays you.
• Stop using the Boost button. It is not a budget version of advertising.

The agency says my website needs a rebuild before the ads will work. Is that true?

• Sometimes, but treat it as a claim that needs evidence. One founder: “We’ve been told twice now that the site needs a rebuild before the ads will work.”
• Make them name the specific step that is broken — the form that fails on mobile, the checkout that drops 70% at payment, the page that takes nine seconds on 4G. A named step is a real finding. “It needs to look more premium” is not.
• The useful counter-view came from the agency side: treat the website as the starting point, not the product.
• Watch for the pattern where the rebuild is the profitable part of the engagement and the growth work never quite starts.

How do I spot an agency that is going to waste my money?

• Guaranteed rankings, or “page 1 in 30 days”. Nobody can promise this.
• Backlinks sold by the number — “20 backlinks a month”. Link costs quoted in the thread ran from about ₹2,600 at the very lowest end to ₹17,600 and far beyond per link, so a cheap package of twenty is telling you what it is.
• A quote produced without ever asking for Search Console or Ads access.
• Reports built on impressions and domain rating with no clicks and no revenue.
• A 6–12 month lock-in at a suspiciously low monthly price.
• Beautiful AI-generated output with nothing behind it. One client: “They used AI tools to make my site look very professional and wrote a lot of blog posts, but it hasn’t brought any noticeable conversions at all.”

My leads dropped suddenly. Is it me or the platform?

• Both were happening this week, which is exactly why you have to check your own instruments first.
• Reported in r/digital_marketing: Meta lead generation down by almost 90% across nine or ten accounts inside five or six days.
• Reported in r/PPC: a Google Shopping account that had been running far above its target return broke after 17 August and did not recover.
• Also live in r/SEO: a Google spam update phase landing on 30 September, with the usual wave of traffic-drop posts behind it.
• Sequence matters. Confirm your tracking, then compare against the same period last year, then look for a platform-wide story. Do not hire someone in week one of a drop.

At what point does paying an agency actually make sense?

• When you have a channel that already converts at a cost you can state out loud, and the bottleneck is volume.
• When what you need is senior judgement rather than execution hours. There was a founder in r/IndianStartups this week at roughly ₹2 crore annualised, average order value above ₹400, 15 staff — and, in his own capitals, no social media presence and no marketing department. At that revenue a real retainer is cheap. At ₹35,000 a month it is theatre.
• One scoped diagnostic bought once is the reasonable middle: a real audit, a keyword map tied to your actual pages rather than a sixty-page automated PDF, and a written month-one and month-two plan.
• Full disclosure, since it would be dishonest to leave it out: I work with GrowthLife, a digital growth agency, and the honest answer at this budget is still that you should not hire us or anyone like us yet.

What should I ask on the sales call?

• “What exactly will you do in month one and month two?” The best line in the thread, from someone who works at an agency: “Honest test: ask each one what they’d do in month 1 and month 2 specifically. If the answer is vague, move on.”
• “What will you need from me, and how many hours of my time?” Engagements die here more often than on strategy.
• “Which metric are we judging this on in 90 days, and what number would mean it failed?”
• “Can I see the Search Console or Ads account of a client in my situation, with the name hidden?”
• Get two or three proposals with deliverables written as quantities, and refuse any lock-in longer than 90 days.

What ₹ bands actually buy, from the threads

Rupee figures converted from commenter-quoted USD at roughly ₹88 to the dollar. Treat as orders of magnitude, not quotes.

What I’d actually do

• Spend week one on instruments, not agencies: reconcile platform clicks against your analytics sessions against your own order records, and fix whatever disagrees.
• Buy one scoped diagnostic from one person, judged purely on how specifically they can describe month one and month two — and keep your monthly budget free for the work it recommends.
• Kill the Boost button, run one conversions campaign at about ₹1,800 a day for three days against a single real event, and treat that number as your baseline before anyone pitches you anything.