Two figures, $149 and $500 a month against one domain, and this reader has already converted both into a slice of payroll and a fortnight of paid search before the sentence ends. That instinct is correct and it is also the problem, because the thing being priced pays back slowest during the exact quarter a young company can least afford to be patient.
Below: what each tier includes, what the two add-ons do to an invoice, where campaign keywords originate and who approves them, a full year costed for a Central Texas company with every step shown, and a plain statement about timing.
Two comparisons this room makes automatically
Almost nobody here judges a marketing subscription against other subscriptions. It gets held up against advertising, whose cost per booked conversation is known precisely, and against headcount, where the natural unit is a fraction of one salary.
Both framings make the price look trivial. A whole year of the schedule further down comes in beneath what plenty of teams here burn through advertising in a fortnight, and beneath one month of a single engineer for most funded companies. Because it reads as free, it gets signed without anyone testing the assumption underneath.
- Advertising resolves inside a week. Money in on Monday produces conversations by Thursday and a defensible cost per opportunity. Switch it off and the effect ends that afternoon.
- This resolves across quarters. The first readable change typically arrives between weeks four and eight, and a readable change is not a customer. What separates the two is unquotable.
- Nor does it stop cleanly. What accumulates keeps standing after the invoices end, which also means abandoning the campaign in month five discards everything the first four months paid for.
- Cheap against payroll proves nothing. The real question is whether anybody will still be attending to it in month ten, because that is roughly where any return becomes visible.
The lower tier, and what the price does not include
AutoSEO — nobody has to remember it
Built for a company where search is on no one's job description and therefore stalls for months at a time.
- Candidate terms surface and get ordered on their own. No brief is written. The queue of proposals is the only thing asking for your attention.
- Reference building proceeds on its own calendar. Placements come out of a partner network running past 230,000 sites, with no monthly planning meeting attached.
- Page-level suggestions are drawn from your site. Recommendations are produced against the pages you actually published, not against a generic audit template.
- Reporting is bundled, not extra. Search Console screens, position tracking, rival domains and an assistant wired into that project's live figures.
Put fairly, this tier abolishes an excuse rather than supplying an answer. Search work in most companies here belongs to whoever has a slow week, which produces one burst in spring and silence until winter. Something that keeps running while everyone is shipping a release is worth more than its feature list implies.
The limitation follows from the same design. Unattended discovery reasons from whatever record already exists, so a two-year-old domain in a category that keeps renaming itself is being read from a small sample — and it will keep being read that way until a person supplies better raw material.
What another $351 a month puts under your control
FullSEO — three places you can intervene
Built for a site where the wrong term, or an unreviewed edit shipped to a page, costs something real.
- Term selection becomes yours, and cannot jam. You pick, but nothing halts if you go quiet for a fortnight — automatic selection carries on beneath whatever is waiting on you.
- You state the authority band for placements. Links are set manually against a Domain Rating target you name, instead of arriving in whatever order the network offers them.
- Edits can be routed past a human first. Review is a setting; behind it sit specialists, developers and writers rather than only software.
That first bullet decides most upgrade arguments, because manual plans usually fail through absence rather than error. Somebody stops opening the queue during a launch and three weeks evaporate. With automatic selection continuing underneath, a distracted month costs precision instead of costing the month.
Review mode earns its keep in a product company for a reason that is easy to miss. Suggestions get generated against pages describing something that was renamed twice this year, and a proposal can read beautifully while being commercially wrong in a way only somebody on the inside would catch.
Where campaign terms come from, and the gate in front of them
Both tiers run off the same underlying keyword pool, fed by three separate inputs whose relative importance shifts a great deal depending on how much history the domain carries.
What you have already been served for
The verified property's own record of queries it appeared against. Exact, and only as deep as the domain is old.
- Richest signal on a mature site
- Close to empty at eighteen months
- Observed rather than modeled
What the results page is showing
Live readings taken off the page itself, which reach phrases your domain has never once appeared against.
- Describes a category, not a company
- Maps ground competitors hold
- Tilts toward high-demand wording
What you type in by hand
Seed phrases entered yourself. Nothing else carries vocabulary that exists only in conversations inside the building.
- An afternoon of work, once
- Where trade language enters
- Decisive when history is thin
How a candidate clears
Suggestions are handled singly — waved through, turned down, or parked until the picture changes.
- Parking is not refusal
- Refusals shape what comes next
- Weekly, in about ten minutes
In a market this competent, where the obvious phrases were taken years ago by people who knew to take them, the third input carries weight the other two cannot. Sit for an hour with whoever handles inbound calls and transcribe the language: the symptom a buyer describes before knowing its name, the incumbent system they want off, the certification that surfaces on every other call.
Fifteen phrases collected that way outperform a two-hundred-row export, because exports are sorted by demand and what you need are the constructions nobody has bid on. It is also the only real protection against a category whose names keep splitting, which around here happens roughly every other year.
Two extras, and why one of them deserves a conversation
Wikipedia slots
Four fixed positions on a dial, and the least consequential figure on the bill.
- The dial has four positions only. Nothing, one, five or ten. Even the highest comes to $100 monthly, which changes neither tier's economics.
- Suitability caps this, not money. Each placement requires a genuinely appropriate home, and most companies have fewer of those than they picture.
PBN slots
So cheap per unit that the largest position on the dial feels like a minor choice.
- The gaps between positions are enormous. Twenty comes to $20 monthly. Five hundred comes to $500, equalling the whole upper tier by itself.
- One dollar each encourages sloppy thinking. What a unit costs implies nothing about what a unit is worth, and the top position is the biggest number on the invoice.
| Dial position | Off | First paid | Middle | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia, $10 each | — | 1 slot, $10 | 5 slots, $50 | 10 slots, $100 |
| Network, $1 each | — | 20 slots, $20 | 100 slots, $100 | 500 slots, $500 |
| Both, monthly | $0 | $30 | $150 | $600 |
| Both, annually | $0 | $360 | $1,800 | $7,200 |
One domain, twelve months, a total you can audit
Consider a Series A company east of the interstate selling scheduling and compliance software to mid-size manufacturers across Central Texas. Single domain, eighteen people, two years of usable search history, and a marketing lead who came from a larger product company and prices everything against her advertising line.
She deliberately opens on the cheaper tier. Early months are mostly discovery, which needs no supervision; the step up waits until enough terms are moving that choosing between them is an actual decision.
| Period | Tier | Extras enabled | Monthly | Period total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Months 1–3 | AutoSEO | None | $149 | $447 |
| Months 4–6 | AutoSEO | Wikipedia, 1 slot | $159 | $477 |
| Months 7–12 | FullSEO | Wikipedia 5, network 20 | $570 | $3,420 |
| Year | — | — | $362 average | $4,344 |
Every step, so the figure can be checked. Subscriptions: $149 across six months is $894, then $500 across six months is $3,000, together $3,894. Extras: a single Wikipedia slot for months four through six is $30; five slots for months seven through twelve is $300; twenty network slots over those same six months is $120, giving $450 of extras. Added up, $4,344 for the year, which is $362 a month once averaged.
For orientation, the same year configured differently. Never leaving the entry tier and enabling nothing: $1,788. Sitting on the upper tier from January with no extras: $6,000. Everything pushed to its ceiling — upper tier, ten Wikipedia slots, five hundred network slots — reaches $1,100 monthly and $13,200 across the year, a configuration this particular company has no business buying.
How long this takes, measured against how long you have
Something readable normally shows between weeks four and eight: a phrase arriving in the top thirty, impressions where a row was blank, a page beginning to get served. Readable is not revenue, and the interval between them is the part nobody honest will put a date on.
A ninety-day pilot therefore proves nothing whatsoever. It examines the opening phase of something whose second phase has not begun, and pulling out there turns the whole spend into a write-off instead of a finding. Fund four quarters or skip it.
Then the version of that which bites in this city. A company holding nine months of cash that begins in January will be back in front of investors around month seven — the least flattering position on the entire curve, where there is movement to point at and no revenue attached to it. Two responses are honest. Begin now, so month seven is genuinely month seven. Or treat it as a post-raise decision and put the money somewhere that reports inside a quarter.
When continuity is the missing piece
A single domain, no owner for the work, and the genuine failure is quarters passing with nothing shipped.
- Seeds entered once, queue read weekly
- Page edits need nobody's approval
- The ceiling is around $200 monthly
When being wrong is expensive
Large contract values, specialized language, or a page edit that would need explaining if it went live unread.
- Technical or regulated subject matter
- Terms that must be chosen, not guessed
- Somebody wants sign-off rights
When there is nothing to steer yet
A young domain where manual selection would be choosing among candidates that barely exist.
- Move up once movement appears
- Put the gap into writing pages
- Reassess at the four-month mark
When the site would waste it
Short runway, no way to convert an arriving visitor, or no one-sentence answer to what the product does.
- Arrivals amplify whatever is there
- Repair the page ahead of the campaign
- A few weeks of work, not a year
What people ask before they commit
Is opening on the cheaper tier and moving up later a sensible sequence?
Usually it is. Early months are dominated by discovery, which the entry tier handles without help. Move up at the point where enough phrases are shifting that picking between them is a real choice — commonly around the fourth to sixth month, and visible in the keyword dynamics screen rather than in anyone's opinion.
How does this stack up against paying a contractor the same amount?
At the entry price there is no comparison; that buys perhaps two hours a month from anyone worth hiring. At the upper price the comparison is genuine, and the split is roughly this: a contractor supplies judgment about your particular category, while a subscription supplies persistence. Contractors fail through gaps between engagements. Subscriptions fail through nobody opening the queue.
Should a company that might get acquired use the network add-on at all?
Judge it on quantity and ignore the unit price entirely. The lower positions are one contributing factor among many. The highest position generates a large, very uniform pattern that a diligence exercise can characterize quickly, and organic traffic gets examined in most of them. Where an exit inside two years is plausible, hold this low or leave it at zero.
What does this cost us in hours each month?
On the entry tier, one afternoon of seeding up front and a short weekly pass through the proposal queue. On the upper tier it is more, since you are selecting phrases and reading proposed edits. Plan for an hour weekly, and recognize that spending less means the automatic route decides by default — acceptable, provided it is a decision rather than a drift.
Can two domains sit on different tiers?
They can, since billing and configuration are both per domain. The common arrangement puts the upper tier on whichever property produces revenue and the entry tier on everything secondary. Linked account groups and site tags then keep both legible from one screen instead of two.
Working out your own figure
Begin by counting, not by comparing tiers. Which addresses exist, which produce revenue, and how much recorded history each has behind it. A company with three domains and one that pays the bills is weighing $149, not $447, and establishing that takes a quarter of an hour.
Next, be honest about the record. Below roughly two years of consistent impressions, manual selection is picking from a very short list, which argues for opening lower. Above it, the additional $351 buys steering you can genuinely apply. The screen tracking threshold movement answers this quicker than any internal debate: phrases arriving in and dropping out of the top thirty mean there is something to steer, and total stillness means there is not.
Leave the extras until last and keep them modest. A single reference slot plus the first paid network position adds thirty dollars monthly to either tier — cheap enough to run as a genuine trial. The top positions are not trials. They amount to a second subscription with a due-diligence note attached to it.
Between the invoice and the work sits Stream, the project feed where new placements appear with donor authority and traffic beside them, scheduled reports land, and open tasks stay in view. It is the practical answer to what a month of spending produced, while the export and report builder turns it into something presentable. Longer walkthroughs live on the blog, and the managed version is set out in how we work with clients.
The failure pattern is easy to recognize from across the room: upper tier purchased immediately because the number looked negligible beside salaries, every dial pushed high because a dollar a unit sounded like nothing, then cancellation in the fifth month on the grounds that pipeline had not moved. Pipeline was never going to have moved by the fifth month. Attach the domain and inspect the candidate terms before committing to a tier — and if what comes back looks thin, the remedy is not a larger subscription. It is an hour spent writing down the language customers actually use on calls, which no product can generate for you and which is precisely what this market pays for.
