How Much Does Copywriting Cost?

01.Why don't serious copywriters price per word?

A per-word price measures typing. The part of copywriting that produces results happens before the first word gets written: someone finds out what you sell, who buys it, what objections those people carry and what would convince them, then decides the message and the order it gets told in. Two texts of 500 words each can be worth completely different amounts to your business. A per-word rate would pay them identically.

Robert Bly sums up the trade in The Copywriter's Handbook with an image that has aged well: a copywriter is a salesperson sitting at a keyboard. The text's job is to sell. The words are only the final form of work that happened in the research, in the structure of the arguments, and in choosing what to leave out.

Per-word pricing does exist on the market, and it makes sense in exactly one place: volume content, where the text has a page to fill and a topic to tick. That market is real, its prices are low, and its results match. When the text has to convince someone, the honest unit is the piece: the page, the article, the email sequence.

02.What does each type of copy cost, concretely?

The bands from the top, unpacked. In each one, the low end and the high end buy different things.

• Copy for a presentation website, 5-7 pages: from a few hundred to over a thousand euros. At the low end you get cleanly written pages based on a questionnaire, with one revision round. At the high end you get interviews with you and sometimes with your clients, a core message formulated and checked against real objections, service pages built on search intent, and on-page SEO. The homepage is the hardest piece in the package; we wrote separately about what to write on your homepage. And in the total budget of a project, copy usually shows up as its own line next to design and development; the other lines are in how much a presentation website costs.
• A researched blog article: from a few dozen to a few hundred euros. The depth of the research makes the difference. A short article written from general knowledge sits at the low end, and it reads like it. One with an interview behind it, verified sources, a structure shaped around what the reader is searching for and 1,500-2,000 words climbs toward the top, because it carries hours of work that happened before the writing.
• A landing page: a few hundred euros. Little text, high stakes. One goal, one message, one structure walking the reader toward one button. You pay for the concentration, plus the same client research compressed into a single page.
• A monthly content retainer: from a few hundred euros a month upward. Articles, a newsletter, social media copy, on a set rhythm. Per piece it comes out cheaper than ordering one at a time, because the research happens once and gets used for months.
• Product descriptions for online stores: per piece, in batches. What matters is how many products you have and how much they differ from each other. That line sits inside the bigger budget we covered in how much an online store costs.

03.What pushes the price up?

Six things, in practice:

1. The niche. Medical, legal, financial, technical: each comes with rules to respect, claims that demand caution, and jargon to translate into the client's language. A copywriter who knows the field charges more and spares you the corrections.
2. The interviews needed. When the information lives in your head or your team's, someone has to get it out. The hours of interviewing and synthesis get paid for, and they are often the most valuable part of the whole project.
3. The SEO work. Choosing keywords, reading search intent, building the structure that answers the reader's actual question: all of it happens before the writing and shows up in the price.
4. A bilingual version. Romanian and English means rewriting for a different audience, with different references. Done well, it costs less than two projects and more than a mechanical translation.
5. Revision rounds. One or two usually come included. Whatever goes beyond them, especially changes to the brief, gets billed separately, and fairly so.
6. Urgency. The text due tomorrow costs more than the text due next week, because it jumps the queue.

04.Why pay a copywriter when ChatGPT writes for free?

The question is legitimate and deserves a straight answer. An AI draft is free, grammatically clean, and sounds like every other AI draft in your niche. The model writes about the topic. A good copywriter writes for your client: they know what brought that person to the page, what holds them back, which objection sits in their head, and what would get them to act. That information comes out of questions, out of listening, out of time spent in the niche. No model has it ready-made.

To be honest about our own side: we use AI for speed too; what you pay for remains the judgment, taste and accountability of a person who knows what they want to say.

The market effect is already visible: the cheap end collapsed. Text that only fills pages became nearly free, because that is the thing AI does best. What stayed expensive, and even got more expensive, is the part before the writing: finding out what needs to be said, to whom, in what order. If your text only has to exist, use AI with a clear conscience. If it has to convince, pay for the thinking.

05.What does cheap copy actually cost you?

The invoice for cheap copy arrives later, through other doors:

• You pay for it twice. Once at the order, again at the rework. In our projects, redoing badly written copy usually costs more than writing it well would have, because the rework ships together with the diagnosis: someone first has to understand why it fails.
• A generic message makes you invisible. "Complete services for every need," "your trusted partner": wording that could be pasted onto any company in the market. The damage is hard to measure, precisely because the text looks normal.
• It gets lost in Google. Thin text on worn-out topics, with no search intent read beforehand: the engine already has a thousand pages just like it, and it leaves yours where it found them.
• The lost clients stay silent. A wrong message on your homepage costs you exactly the clients you never see: they arrive, read, fail to recognize themselves, and leave. Nobody calls to tell you why.

06.What should a serious quote contain?

A good quote gives itself away by what it names. Ask for it in writing and look for:

1. The pieces, by name. Which pages or which texts, with approximate lengths. "Website copy" without a page list leaves room for interpretation exactly where it hurts.
2. The research included. Questionnaire, interview, market research: what happens before the writing, and with whom.
3. The revisions. How many rounds the price includes, what counts as a round, and what anything beyond them costs.
4. The timeline. With stages if the project is bigger: the message first, the pages after.
5. Ownership of the text. After payment the copy belongs to you, fully. Worth having in black and white.
6. What stays out. Publishing into the site, images, technical SEO: all of it can be added, but it should be named, so you can compare quotes on the same content.

07.When is writing it yourself the right call?

There is one case where the honest answer is "write it yourself." You know your clients cold: you talk to them weekly, you can recite their objections without thinking, you can say in one sentence what sets you apart. And you have the time. Then your own copy, even imperfect, beats cheap outsourced copy, because the raw material lives with you.

What you lose working alone is the outside eye: structure, the discipline of cutting, distance from your own jargon. The good compromise is writing the first version yourself and paying only for the edit. It costs a fraction of the full project and keeps your voice.

And for copy that only informs, FAQ pages, terms and conditions, announcements, in-house writing is almost always enough. Save the budget for the pages that sell.

08.The GoodGlyph take

Before you ask for prices, decide what each text has to achieve. The homepage and the service pages have to convince: pay for thinking there, ask for research included and a formulated message checked against objections. The blog has to bring people in from search: pay for research depth there, at whatever rhythm you can sustain. The copy that only informs you can write yourself, with a paid edit on top if you want peace of mind. And if you want a quote on your actual pieces, with firm numbers where this article gives orientation, our content service works exactly that way: it starts from what you sell and builds the copy around it.

09.Closing

Words are the cheap part of copywriting. The expensive part is knowing what to say, to whom, in what order, and it shows up only in results: people who read and then call. Pay for the expensive part. The rest anyone can write, including a machine.