What does your email production cost?
Email production costs the hours it takes to get each email from an approved brief to a sign-off, times your cost per hour, plus what you pay agencies, freelancers and translators. Extra review rounds are where the hours grow, and every market you send to repeats them. This calculator uses only your own numbers.
The calculator needs JavaScript. Every formula is written out under “How the numbers are worked out”, so you can do the same sums in a spreadsheet.
How the numbers are worked out.
Every output is a plain sum of what you typed. Nothing is compared with a benchmark, and nothing is a promise.
| Output | How it is worked out |
|---|---|
| Master emails a month (N) | campaign emails + flow emails |
| Market editions a month (E) | N × markets per email |
| Hours per edition | translate + local details + build + QA + first review + (review rounds − 1) × hours per extra round |
| Hours a month | N × hours per master email + E × hours per edition |
| Share of hours on editions | edition hours ÷ hours a month |
| Hours on extra review rounds | E × (review rounds − 1) × hours per extra round |
| Agency and translation fees | E × translation fee + agency fees |
| Hours per email | hours a month ÷ N |
| People, full time | hours a month ÷ working hours per person |
| Cost a month | hours a month × cost per hour + E × translation fee + agency fees + tool costs |
| Cost a year | 12 × cost a month |
| One more market | N × hours per edition, and N × (hours per edition × cost per hour + translation fee) |
Hours are rounded to the nearest half hour and euros to whole euros. When there are no emails, the outputs show a dash.
Where do the hours usually go?
The first draft is rarely the expensive part. The hours sit in what follows it: making the email look and sound like the brand, getting the links and the legal line right, building it in the ESP, checking it and waiting for each review round. In a brand that sends to several markets, all of that repeats for every edition, while the master email is written once.
Review rounds are the number to watch. A second round on every edition adds the extra-round hours once per market, every month. The multi-market email QA checklist and a complete email brief are the two cheapest ways to keep editions to one round.
Questions
Does this calculator save or send my numbers?
No. The sums run in your browser and nothing you type leaves the page. Copy the result or download it as a CSV file if you want to keep it, for example for a business case or a budget discussion with your manager.
What should I count as the loaded cost per hour?
Use what an hour of your team’s time costs the company: salary, employer taxes and a share of overhead, divided by working hours. Finance often has a standard figure. If you only know the salary, a common rough method is to add a fixed share on top, but use your own company’s figure when there is one.
How do I count flow emails?
Count the flow emails you create or change in a typical month, not the ones that run unchanged. A welcome series you rewrote this quarter counts in the month you worked on it. Flows that send without anyone touching them cost no production hours.
Why is there no comparison with Caliber?
Because the calculator is about your production as it runs today, in your numbers. A comparison would need numbers we have not measured. Bring your result to a walkthrough instead, and look at it against your own briefs and markets.
Where Caliber fits
Caliber is being built for the hours after the brief is approved: an approved brief will become a finished email, built from the brand’s own blocks, written in its voice and checked against its rules and legal lines, with an edition for every market a brand sends to, ready for a named person to sign off. Drafts go to your ESP through Caliber’s integrations with Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next, Voyado, Customer.io and Iterable.