Marketing as a Service (MaaS) is a subscription to marketing capacity: an outside team that runs your content, campaigns, and operations on an ongoing basis. Growth as a Service (GaaS) is a subscription in which one provider owns strategy, execution, and measurement together. The practical difference is whether the provider owns the activity or the whole loop.
This guide defines both terms using the publishers that rank for them, compares them in a table, places them among the other "as-a-service" marketing models, gives a neutral history of the term Growth as a Service and its other meanings, and ends with five questions that reveal which one a vendor is really selling.
What is Marketing as a Service (MaaS)?
Marketing as a Service is an operating model in which a company subscribes to an external marketing team instead of buying one-off projects or hiring the team itself. The label is mostly used by providers that serve B2B and enterprise marketing departments.
The most cited definition comes from 2X, a B2B provider that has built its business around the term. Its guide What is Marketing-as-a-Service? (January 2026) defines it this way: "Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a subscription-based operating model that gives an organization ongoing access to integrated marketing strategy, content, campaigns, creative, analytics, and sales and marketing operations through an embedded or semi-embedded team." The same page says MaaS teams work inside the client's CRM, marketing automation, and reporting tools.
A second definition, from the Growigami glossary (March 2026), is shorter: "An outsourced marketing model where an external team provides comprehensive marketing execution — strategy, content, demand gen, paid media, and RevOps — as an ongoing service rather than project-based engagements." That page also publishes a price: "MaaS typically runs $15K-40K per month," as of September 2026. It is one provider's figure, not a market survey, but it shows where the label sits: MaaS is usually sold to companies that already have a marketing leader and a real budget.
Put the two together: MaaS extends or replaces a marketing department's capacity. The client normally keeps a marketing leader who sets direction, and the MaaS team carries it out inside the client's systems.
What is Growth as a Service (GaaS)?
Growth-as-a-Service (GaaS) is a subscription model in which one provider owns a company's marketing strategy, execution, and measurement for a flat monthly price. The term is also used for outsourced sales development and for fractional growth leadership; here we mean the marketing model.
The word that matters in that definition is "owns." A GaaS provider does not wait for a brief. It decides what to do, does it, measures what happened, and makes the next decision, and the client can see all of it. At Scalehackerlab, AI marketing agents (an orchestrator plus 8 specialists) produce the work, senior human strategists direct and review everything before it ships, and results live in the Scale AI-hub. Plans run from $199 to $899 per month, with Enterprise custom from $3,000; the details are on the pricing page. The full model is explained in what is Growth-as-a-Service.
MaaS vs GaaS: what is the difference?
The difference is what the provider owns. MaaS owns activity and output: the campaigns ran, the content shipped, the operations were handled. GaaS owns the outcome loop: choosing the work, producing it, measuring it, and changing course when a number stalls. Owning the loop is not a promise of results, and no honest provider guarantees those. It means there is one party who is answerable for the number every week.
| Criterion | Marketing as a Service (MaaS) | Growth as a Service (GaaS) |
|---|---|---|
| What is owned | Activity and output within an agreed set of capabilities | The loop: strategy, execution, measurement, next decision |
| Who sets strategy | Usually the client's marketing leader | The provider, with the client approving |
| Pricing | Monthly or quarterly subscription to a capability set | Flat monthly subscription by tier |
| Who does the work | An embedded or semi-embedded external team | The provider's system (at Scalehackerlab, AI agents reviewed by senior strategists) |
| Measurement | Reporting inside the client's tools | A live dashboard the provider maintains and the client can open |
| Typical buyer | B2B or enterprise marketing department that needs capacity | SMB of 10–200 employees with no marketing department to extend |
The pricing row quotes 2X, which describes MaaS as replacing "unpredictable project spending with a consistent monthly or quarterly investment." Both models are subscriptions, so price structure alone will not tell you which one you are looking at.
Why does the difference matter to a small business?
It matters because most small businesses do not have the marketing leader that MaaS assumes. A capacity model works when someone inside the company can direct it. Without that person, you have bought output with no one steering.
The numbers on small-business marketing describe that gap. 42% of SMBs have less than one hour per day to spend on marketing, and only 18% feel confident in their results, down from 27% in 2024, according to Constant Contact's State of Small Business Marketing survey (2025) of 2,500 small businesses in four countries. An owner with under an hour a day cannot brief, direct, and review an embedded team.
One caution on the word "outcome." Owning the outcome loop is different from outcome-based pricing, where you pay only for results. That pricing is still rare: only 19% of services buyers use outcome-based arrangements today, according to Gartner analyst Tom Coshow as quoted by CIO Dive (2026). Most GaaS offers, including ours, are flat subscriptions. You pay a fixed monthly price, and the accountability comes from month-to-month terms and live numbers rather than from a performance fee.
The other as-a-service cousins
Four neighboring models get confused with MaaS and GaaS. Each one sells a different thing.
- Fractional CMO. A senior marketing executive's time, part-time. You get judgment and leadership and still need someone to execute. See Growth as a Service vs fractional CMO.
- Outsourced marketing department. An older name for roughly what MaaS sells: an external team acting as your marketing staff. It is usually priced by the hour or through a monthly fee, and it may or may not include strategy.
- RevOps as a service. Outsourced revenue operations: CRM administration, lead routing, attribution, and reporting. It fixes the plumbing between marketing and sales and does not produce campaigns.
- Service-as-software. The investor thesis behind many of these offers: AI lets a company sell finished work with software-like economics instead of selling a tool.
The last idea explains why the category is growing now. Sequoia Capital's essay Services: The New Software (March 2026) states it directly:
If you sell the tool, you're in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with.
Andreessen Horowitz made a related point in AI Is Driving A Shift Towards Outcome-Based Pricing (December 2024), arguing that "per-seat is no longer the atomic unit of software." Both are opinion essays from investors, not market data. They help explain why a subscription to marketing work can now cost less than a marketing team, which we cover in why AI changes the unit economics of service delivery.
History and other meanings of the term Growth as a Service
Growth as a Service has no single agreed meaning and no clear inventor. There is no neutral encyclopedia entry in English, and the pages that rank for the term define it in at least six ways. The definitions below are quoted from each provider's own page as of September 2026.
- An external growth team plus a platform. Bloxx: "a productised model where an external team plus a platform run your growth function for a predictable monthly fee, accountable to a clear outcome — usually pipeline."
- A growth team for startups and B2B SaaS. growth.cx: "a performance-driven external growth team that combines strategy, experimentation, and execution to scale revenue for startups and B2B SaaS companies." Conbersa: "a model where startups outsource growth execution to specialized external providers".
- Fractional marketing leadership. Spring Agency says GaaS "is often understood as a fractional CMO service, marketing for hire or CMO for hire." Core Bloom sells fractional CMO and business development roles under its GaaS page, and ikaros describes its offer as "Growth for hire."
- Outsourced sales development. Grant & Graham: "an outsourced business development model in which an experienced external team acts as your new business function".
- Lifecycle and loyalty marketing. FrodX: "a model in which we set up, manage and optimize lifecycle marketing, loyalty programs and communication for repeat purchases".
- Performance-priced customer acquisition. The English Baidu Baike entry calls it "an intelligent customer acquisition service business model, a concept proposed in 2025," and credits the Chinese firm Shunwei Artificial Intelligence.
On the question of origin, the dates do not support a 2025 coinage. Spring Agency's article carries the date 27 April 2023 on its page, two years before the date in the Baidu Baike entry. It is the earliest dated use among the pages we reviewed, and it may not be the first. The fair conclusion is that several firms reached the phrase independently, by analogy with software as a service, and the meaning is still settling.
How to tell which one a vendor is actually selling
Five questions separate a capacity subscription from an accountable growth function, whatever the vendor calls it:
- Who writes the strategy, and who can change it? If the answer is "you brief us," it is MaaS or an agency. If the provider proposes the plan and revises it from the numbers, it is closer to GaaS.
- What happens when a metric stalls? A capacity provider keeps delivering the agreed scope. A provider that owns the loop should tell you what it will change and when.
- Where do I see results, and how often? A monthly report means activity is being reported. A dashboard you can open any day means measurement is part of the product.
- Who does the work, and who reviews it before it ships? Ask for roles, and ask what is produced by AI and what is reviewed by a person.
- What are the terms, and what do I own if I leave? Look for month-to-month terms, no setup fees, and ad accounts, data, and content that stay yours.
A longer buyer's checklist is in how to evaluate AI marketing services.
Where to start
Start with one question: does someone inside your company set marketing direction today? If yes, and that person needs capacity, a MaaS provider or an agency will serve you well. If no, extra capacity will not help until someone owns the plan and the number, and that is the job GaaS is built for.
If you want an outside view before you decide, the free growth assessment returns a strategy document within 48 hours, with no credit card. Then put the five questions above to every vendor you talk to, including us.