How much does it cost to build a Facebook community?

I work at a stealth startup that is investing heavily in community building. We started with Discord but thought Facebook is a better choice. We worked with an agency in Philippines that promised to build the community for us. It has been about 14 months and we never had the expected results. Finally, we fired the agency. They charged us $4000 per month. We found out that most of the users they onboarded in our community were fake accounts or bots...

Now we look for new platform and build the community in-house. I am building a small team of community builders and interns to start from scratch. So it was not worth outsourcing the community building part.

Thank you for the insight, Sophie - and welcome to Jatra.

I strongly believe that a business community should not be hosted on Facebook. FB groups are good to test the community viability. I wrote a guide to building minimum viable community - do give it a read. The idea is to test if there's a potential to build the community. You can do it on any popular platforms like Telegram, WhatsApp, FB groups etc.

That doesn't mean FB groups shouldn't be used for community building. I'd pick Facebook groups to build hobby communities, niche groups where interaction is more important than business outcome.

Outsourcing the community building is a different game altogether. If you don't have the in-house resources to build your community, you may outsource it to community vendors. At Jatra, we offer community research, content seeding services.

Also - you can start with a good strategy and then building a team of interns to seed your community. Once it starts gaining momentum, you can then take over the community and hire a dedicated community manger.