Two costs are shown deliberately. Review time is the work itself; headcount is what you actually pay, because a person rostered to watch a 16-hour window gets paid for the window whether comments arrive or not.
What is this calculator?
Comment moderation rarely appears as a line item. It hides inside someone’s job — a marketing executive checking the page between tasks, an intern on evenings, the owner on their phone at midnight. Because it is never costed, it never gets budgeted, and it quietly grows every time an ad performs well.
This puts a number on it. Enter your comment volume and what an hour of your team’s time costs, and you get the monthly bill for doing it by hand — separated into the work that matters and the work spent deleting spam.
Why coverage costs more than workload
Four hundred comments at fifteen seconds each is well under two hours of actual reading. Yet you cannot cover sixteen hours a day with two hours of labour, because the comments do not arrive in a neat block. Someone has to be present and paying attention across the whole window, which is why the headcount figure is usually the honest one for budgeting.
The spam line is the important one
On most Bangladeshi commercial pages, well over half of all comments need no human judgement at all — promotional links, repeated tags, abuse, competitor spam. That share of your moderation bill buys nothing. It is the portion automation removes first, and it is usually enough on its own to pay for the tool.
Frequently asked questions
Fifteen seconds per comment sounds low. Is that realistic?
It is right for the common case: read it, decide it is spam, hide it. Genuine questions take much longer because they need an answer, a stock check, sometimes a price. If most of your comments need real replies, raise the slider to thirty or forty-five seconds and the monthly figure moves sharply.
Should I include the owner’s own time?
Yes, and value it properly. Owner-moderated pages look free on paper while consuming the most expensive hour in the business, usually late at night. Putting a real rate against that hour is often the moment the spend becomes obvious.
Does automation replace the whole cost?
No, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling. It removes the spam share and the discovery delay. Genuine buying questions still need a human answer — you are paying people to reply to customers instead of to delete rubbish.
Why is cost per comment useful?
It makes the trend visible. Cost per comment stays flat as you scale, so doubling ad spend doubles this bill. It is the cleanest way to see moderation as a variable cost of advertising rather than a fixed overhead.
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