How we're spending our marketing budget in 2026 (with actual $ figures)

It still really annoys me that no one is willing to talk about how much they actually spend on marketing in startup-land. I wrote about it in 2023, but nothing's changed, so here I am again, but with more budget to talk about.

So how much does a typical scale-up like PostHog spend on marketing. And why doesn’t anyone talk about it?

“But Charles, you naive idiot, surely competitors will use this information against you?”

Um, sure I guess? But especially if you’re into product-led growth (like we are), how you spend marketing $ seems pretty far down the list of competitive advantages. We're open source and we already tell everyone our strategy and what we’re going to build next. That doesn’t seem to have hurt us so far.

By sharing some of this info, I’m hoping it’ll help others as a data point. I am not saying this is the best way to spend your marketing budget. I have no idea! That’s the point!! But I’m hoping maybe someone will see this and tell us how we could do better...

See you in 3 years?

But first, some context...

Startups are different (woah, much insight!)

Here's some background about PostHog before you start copying this stuff and then sending me angry messages when this tanks your company:

• AI platform that makes your product self-driving
• 215 people, $194m raised
• Team is mostly engineers, product-led growth with a bit of sales-led
• Post product-market fit, scaling rapidly

Let’s get into it.

Show me the money

Our typical monthly marketing spend looks like this.

People: $210k per month (3x vs. 2023):

• Marketing: 4 product marketers + 1 influencer manager
• Editorial: 3 content marketers + 1 social media manager
• YouTube: 2 producers + 1 developer advocate
• Events: 2 events managers
• Docs & Wizard: 3 context engineers
• Demand gen: 1 performance marketer + 1 copywriter
• Graphics: 3 designers
• 1 exec who mostly gets in the way

Not people: ~$1m per month (13x vs. 2023):

• Tools & subscriptions: $5,000
• Paid ads: $488,000
• Video: $45,000
• Editorial freelancers: $20,000
• Sponsorships (newsletters & influencers): $228,000
• Out of home (ie. billboards): $67,000
• Merch: $60,000
• Events: $65,000
• Do more weird: $45,000
• PR: $0

Total: ~$1.2m per month

Some notes

• We are in the middle of repositioning PostHog as the platform that makes your product self-driving. This means we are thinking a lot more about awareness, especially as we've seen our ICP changing.

• We do a lot of things in-house that other companies would probably use freelancers for. We're not averse to freelancers, but given how important brand marketing is to PostHog, it has been worth it for us to over-invest here.

• 
  Website Team
  
  Website Team is its own team at PostHog, but I appreciate at most companies your website will be considered a marketing expense (we disagree - treat your website like a product!)

If you want to learn more about how we implement these things in practice, it’s all in our public handbook.

What we’ve changed recently

In the last 9 months, we've roughly doubled the marketing teams, including hiring many first people in their role such as influencer manager, dev advocate for YouTube, copywriter, and social media manager (and we've gone from 1 to 4 product marketers).

An extremely obvious observation - you need to hire people to be able to spend more money (unless you are keen to just set money on fire). You can't just turn up the magic marketing budget dial and expect results. For example, we did influencer marketing as a side project before hiring, but it would have been pointless to increase the budget for the sake of it even though it was 'working'. Events turned out to be very difficult to do on the side, so we didn't spend anything on them until we hired our first person there.

Our general framework for any new marketing channel is, broadly:

1. Have someone try it as a side project, give them a bit of budget.
2. Use this to decide if the thing broadly works.
3. Hire someone dedicated who is really good at that thing.
4. Give them lots of budget.

We've also shifted our budget more broadly from 80/20 conversion/awareness focus to 60/40. The line between the two buckets is blurry, but generally marketing designed to get folks to sign up to PostHog directly we consider to be conversion-focused, whereas stuff that is purely to make people aware that PostHog exists we call... awareness.

For the second half of 2026, we also shuffled budget around a bit to invest more heavily in the stuff that is really working. We're doubling down on influencer marketing and merch in particular, and have also added a new line for do more weird which anyone at PostHog can use. This will hopefully help us keep things fresh and not accidentally creep into the pure-ROI-based marketing that sucks the life out of companies as they scale.

Oh and did you know we're hiring? Probably only 3-4 more people into marketing this year, but keep an eye out on our careers page!

What do you think?

Are the figures what you expected? Should we be spending more money somewhere else? Are we doing something very stupid?

Let me know!

Moar reading

• The do's and don'ts of minimum viable product marketing
• How to grow your AEO function (without losing your mind)
• 40 things we’ve learned about marketing for developers

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