What marketing mix modeling costs

Anatomy 1: open-source (license $0, people not)

Meridian, Robyn, and PyMC-Marketing are free to run.¹ The cost is the operator: median US data-scientist salary $120,230² (BLS OEWS May 2025), loaded to about $175,852³ using the ECEC compensation-to-wages ratio of 1.46³. First-year reality: most of that person's time. Steady state: perhaps half, an assumption we state rather than measure.

Anatomy 2: self-serve SaaS (published)

Sellforte publishes tiers scaling with media spend from $2,990/mo⁴, with a calculator whose five-market, $10M/mo example prices at about $25,000/mo⁴. Cassandra (cassandra.app) publishes four tiers from EUR 2,700/mo⁵, scaling on prior-year media spend. Both verified 2 August 2026.

Anatomy 3: managed programs

Paramark is the only managed-program vendor in our registry publishing full tiers: $100,000/yr⁶ Essentials, $150,000/yr⁶ Advanced, $220,000+/yr⁶ Enterprise, verified 2 August 2026, and notably up from its earlier "starting at $75,000" copy. The quote-only roll call, verified the same month: Recast, Mutinex, Keen Decision Systems, Analytic Partners, Nielsen, Haus, Prescient AI, Lifesight, Measured. That is 9 of 12 managed vendors declining to print a number. Enterprise incumbents (Nielsen, Analytic Partners) scope every engagement individually; no public floor exists and we cite none.

Handling quote-only vendors on a call

Say the published anchors out loud early: the vendor now knows you know the bracket. Ask for the price drivers itemized (channels, markets, refresh, experiments), ask what the renewal uplift history looks like, and get the offboarding data terms in writing. Then use the 12 questions for the methodology half of the call.

The slide number

For a $5-30M-spend brand, the defensible sentence reads: "Independent published pricing for MMM spans $35,880 to $220,000+ per year; building in-house costs about $175,852 per year fully loaded at BLS rates; we recommend [path] and will validate it with [N] geo experiments in year one." Every number in that sentence traces to this page's ledger, which is the point of this site.