Nobody publishes childcare marketing prices, which is why this page exists. Directors comparing options meet a fog of "packages start from" and "book a call to discuss", and the fog serves sellers, not centres. What follows is the actual cost terrain, including our own prices, plus the one calculation that makes any of it judgeable.
The calculation that comes first
A marketing price means nothing in isolation; it means everything against enrolment value. One filled place earns its weekly fee for as long as the family stays, commonly years, and because a centre's costs are mostly fixed, most of that revenue lands as margin. A single enrolment is routinely worth more than a year of substantial marketing investment. Every price below should be read against that yardstick, and the ROI calculator runs it with your own fees.
The cost terrain, option by option
Doing it yourself prices in hours: building and maintaining the channels, writing the follow-ups, chasing the reviews. Genuinely viable for some centres, we've written the honest version, but never free, and priced at the doer's opportunity cost. A director doing DIY marketing is trading the business's most expensive attention for its cheapest task rate.
Buying pieces means paying per asset or channel: a videographer for a shoot, a freelancer for the website, an ads manager for campaigns. Piece prices vary wildly with quality and sector fluency (video pricing gets its own guide). The hidden cost of the piecemeal route is the joins: nobody owns the whole funnel, so pieces underperform their price because nothing connects them.
Generalist retainers buy ongoing attention from an agency that serves plumbers on Monday and centres on Tuesday. The retainer range is wide; the constant is translation cost, you'll spend meetings teaching them ratios, consent, seasonality and what a director actually worries about, and the content still tends to arrive generic. Some generalists are excellent; the question to ask is what they've done in early education specifically and what they understand about filming around children.
Specialist partnership is the category we're in, so read with that declared. EEVA's complete partnership is $590 per week plus GST for the Story assets (video, photography, produced child-safe by an ECE-only crew) and the Engine (the enrolment platform, follow-up, tour booking, review workflows) as one system. The platform alone runs $490 per month plus GST; fixed-scope Sprints at $3,500 and $1,990 plus GST are the smaller doors in. The pitch reduced to arithmetic: one newly enrolled child covers the weekly cost, and the assets keep working after any given family enrols.
What actually drives price differences
Four things, across every option. Sector fluency, whether the provider arrives knowing early education or bills you for their learning curve. Asset versus activity, whether the money buys things that compound (video, review bases, search presence) or effort that evaporates (posts, boosts, "management"). Integration, whether the pieces connect into a funnel or sit as orphans. Compliance capability, in this sector specifically: consent handling, WWCC-cleared crews, and imagery discipline aren't extras, and providers who don't mention them are telling you something.
Cheap options usually fail the first and last tests; expensive ones aren't automatically passing any of them. Ask the four questions and price-shop within the providers that clear them.
The spend most centres should make first
Whatever the budget, sequence beats size: fix the funnel before buying traffic, build the compounding assets before renting attention, and never spend into a leaking pipeline. If the budget is genuinely tiny, the review system plus a fast-response setup costs almost nothing and outperforms any equivalent spend on promotion.
And whatever you do next, start from evidence: the free Enrolment Story Audit shows what your current presence and funnel deliver, benchmarked locally, in 48 hours, no call and no obligation, which makes it the cheapest marketing decision available in the sector.
