At some point almost every founder too busy for LinkedIn considers the same fix. Hire a virtual assistant, hand over the login, let them handle it. Looks clean on paper. In practice it usually trades one problem for three new ones.
The invoice is the smallest part of the cost
A decent VA handling LinkedIn engagement runs anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 a month depending on experience. That's the number people budget for. What they don't budget for is weeks of onboarding someone to your voice, your industry, and your actual prospects, and none of that happens overnight.
Then there's the ongoing management. Reviewing what they've posted. Correcting tone when it drifts. Explaining, again, why commenting on a recruiter's post doesn't help even though it technically matched the keyword. That's not passive outsourcing. That's a part-time management job created in exchange for getting LinkedIn off your own plate.
The voice problem is the real issue
Here's the part hardest to fix, no matter how good the VA is. They didn't build the company. They don't have your specific opinions. No amount of documentation changes the fact that their comments will read slightly off. Sometimes it's obvious, overly formal phrasing, generic enthusiasm, missing the specific detail you'd have thrown in without thinking. Sometimes it's subtle enough that only you notice. You'll notice every time, though.
Prospects notice too, even if they can't say why. A comment that reads slightly generic doesn't build the same trust as one that clearly came from the actual founder whose name is attached to it.
What happens when the VA leaves
Turnover is the quiet cost nobody mentions upfront. VAs change roles, take on other clients, stop being available. When that happens, the presence built over months goes quiet again while a new person gets hired and retrained, and the onboarding cost starts over from zero.
A different way to think about it
The actual goal was never "get someone else to do LinkedIn for me." It was "stop spending hours a day on something that should take fifteen minutes." Those are different problems, and they call for different fixes.
Allen was built around the second one. Instead of handing your voice to another person, you train an AI on it directly, your bio, your style, real comments you've written, and it gets sharper the more you use it. It finds posts from people who match your actual prospects and drafts comments that sound like you because they're built from your own writing, not a VA's best guess at it.
At $97 a month it's a fraction of even the low end of VA pricing, without the onboarding, the management overhead, or the turnover risk. Nothing gets outsourced to someone else. What gets removed is the part of the process that never needed a human in the first place, the searching and the first draft.
Start a free trial and compare a week of Allen against what managing a VA has actually looked like for you.