Looking for an FMG Suite alternative.

The two products are not competing on quality. They are competing on who writes.

FMG Suite publishes plans in the range of roughly $178 to $999 a month, plus a setup fee of about $994 to $2,999, according to FMG’s own published pricing. What you buy is access — a stocked library of articles, videos, emails and social posts, plus the scheduling tools to push them out. The advisor, or someone in the advisor’s office, picks the pieces and builds the calendar.

What we sell is the opposite shape. There is no library. There is a twenty-minute conversation each month, and out of it comes a four-page issue written as though you wrote it — your read on the last quarter, the question three clients asked you in a row, the reason you moved someone out of a target-date fund. Then it gets printed, mailed, turned into a digital flipbook and emailed.

Neither is the better product in the abstract. The question is whether your problem is not having content or not having time to make content yours.

Stay with FMG Suite if your home office has a say.

This is the important paragraph on the page, so it is near the top. If you are registered with a broker-dealer and your compliance department requires that marketing material come from an approved vendor with pre-reviewed content, FMG Suite is the right answer and we are not. Their compliance infrastructure — the pre-approval workflows, the archiving, the integrations with the review systems your home office already runs — is the actual product for a large share of their customers, and it is not something a one-person shop replicates.

We can write for a compliance review. We cannot arrive pre-approved. If your firm’s rule is that nothing goes out unless it came out of the approved-vendor list, do not spend a call finding that out. Renew with FMG.

Where a library stops working.

Library content is written to be usable by thousands of advisors at once, which means it is written to be true of all of them. It cannot mention that you sat with a widow in March, or that you think the annuity your competitor down the road is pushing is wrong for most people over seventy. The specific things — the ones a client forwards to a sibling — are exactly the things a shared library cannot contain.

The second thing is the calendar. A subscription assumes someone in your office will sit down and schedule it. In practice that person is you, and it is the first task to lose when a client calls. Month four is where advisor newsletters die, and month four is not a content problem.

• Library: unlimited pieces, none of them about you.
• Ghostwritten: one piece a month, all of it about you.
• Library: you assemble and schedule.
• Ghostwritten: you approve a draft and go back to work.

Print is the piece most advisor platforms leave to you.

Advisor marketing has drifted almost entirely to email and social, which is why a mailed piece now stands out on a kitchen counter. Our default is both: printed and mailed to the households that matter, and the same issue published as a flipbook link you can email and text. Print and postage are billed through at cost — we don’t mark them up.

If you only want digital, that is a named, cheaper option, not a favor. Plenty of advisors with a younger book take digital only.

The commercial differences, stated plainly.

FMG publishes its prices, which is more than most vendors in this category do, and the setup fee is real money before anything mails. We publish a range and give you the whole number on the first call, because the same newsletter costs very different amounts at five hundred households and five thousand.

The other difference is who picks up. You will talk to the person writing your issue, every month, because there is only one of us. That is a genuine limit as well as a feature — we take a small number of advisors and we say no when the calendar is full.

How to decide in one sitting.

1. Ask compliance whether outside-written material is permitted at all. If not, stop here.
2. Open the last three things your current platform sent. Could any other advisor in the country have sent them unchanged?
3. Check whether anything went out at all in the last ninety days.
4. If the answer to two is yes and to three is no, the problem is voice and production, not library size.