The monthly fee is the part of this decision that appears in the accounts. It is not the expensive part. The expensive part is founder attention, and no invoice records it — which is why companies routinely choose the option that costs less in dollars and considerably more in the only resource they are actually short of.
Both published figures are straightforward. A domain on AutoSEO costs 149 dollars a month; the same domain on FullSEO costs 500. Two add-ons are ordered separately: encyclopedic placements at 10 dollars each in steps of 0, 1, 5 or 10, and network placements at 1 dollar each in steps of 0, 20, 100 or 500. Everything below is arithmetic on those four numbers.
The second column nobody writes down
Every option in this space has a price and a demand on attention, and the two move in opposite directions. Cheaper tools ask more of you; more expensive ones ask less. A company evaluating only the first column will systematically pick the option that eats the most of its own time, and will not notice, because the cost lands as evenings rather than as a line item.
| Option | Monthly fee | Hours it asks of you | Which column hurts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself with free tools | 0 $ | Six to ten a month | The second |
| Entry tier, running unattended | 149 $ | Under one a month | Neither, materially |
| Full tier, actively steered | 500 $ | Two a month, at least | Both, moderately |
| Agency on retainer | Varies, higher | Two to four in meetings | Usually the first |
The first row is the one worth sitting with. Six to ten hours a month of founder or lead-engineer time, valued at anything close to what that time actually generates, is by a wide margin the most expensive option on the table. It reads as free because nobody sends a bill for it.
There is a second reason the hours column deserves a number rather than a shrug. Attention in an early company is not merely scarce; it is lumpy. The six hours are not six evenly distributed hours — they are one bad Thursday in the middle of a release week, which is when the work gets dropped rather than done. An option whose demand is under an hour a month survives that pattern. An option demanding several hours does not, and it fails silently: the subscription continues, the work stops, and nobody notices for a quarter.
What separates the two tiers in practice
AutoSEO — proceeds without you
Built for the case where the site is one of six things somebody owns.
- Query suggestions arrive on their own. Drawn from Google reporting, observed results and your own seed terms. Accept, reject or defer as you like; three silent weeks do not stall anything.
- Placements accumulate in the background. Through the partner network, without per-item approval — the point at which this differs from a tool licence that waits for input.
- Suggestions target existing pages. A named page and a specific change, rather than a rebuild nobody has capacity for.
- Analytics carry no surcharge. Reporting, position history and the project log are inside the monthly figure, not billed separately.
FullSEO — control, if exercised
Built for the case where a named person can judge query selection.
- Queries chosen by hand, with a fallback. If nobody gets to it, automatic selection resumes. Nothing stalls — but the surcharge buys nothing that month either.
- Placements above a set threshold. A minimum authority is defined rather than taking whatever is available, which is the property examined during due diligence.
- Human review before changes take effect. Proposed edits pass a check first.
- People included in the scope. The provider names search, development and copy specialists as part of this tier.
The fallback in the first bullet of the second tier is the detail that decides most of these cases. It guarantees that nothing breaks when the named person is busy, and it also guarantees that the surcharge is silently wasted whenever that happens. In a company where priorities shift monthly, that is not an edge case.
Put the other way round: the surcharge is worth paying only where someone can order queries by expected deal value rather than by search volume. That skill is not common and it is not acquired from a dashboard — it comes from knowing which customers are profitable, which is knowledge a founder usually has and a marketing hire usually does not for the first six months. In practice this means the full tier is often better suited to a company at month eighteen than at month three, regardless of what either can afford.
Two add-ons, available only in steps
| Add-on | Per slot | Available steps | Largest step, monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Encyclopedic placements | 10 $ | 0 · 1 · 5 · 10 | 100 $ |
| Network placements | 1 $ | 0 · 20 · 100 · 500 | 500 $ |
Nothing exists between the steps. Deciding that seven encyclopedic placements would be about right means choosing between five and ten — fifty or a hundred dollars a month, six hundred dollars apart over a year. That is a large enough gap to belong in the original request rather than in a later explanation.
It also helps to be clear about what each add-on is actually for, because they are frequently ordered together and evaluated as one line. The encyclopedic slots target sources that get quoted when an answer is assembled; the network slots affect how a site is weighed in conventional ranking. Those are different mechanisms with different timelines, and reporting them in a single row guarantees that neither can be assessed. Separating them in the plan costs nothing and makes the year-end review possible.
Four lines, fully worked
All figures in dollars, before tax and before any discount. Each total is one multiplication.
| Line | Composition | Monthly | Twelve months |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | AutoSEO plus 20 network placements (20 $) | 169 $ | 2 028 $ |
| B | AutoSEO plus 5 encyclopedic (50 $) plus 20 network (20 $) | 219 $ | 2 628 $ |
| C | Two domains on AutoSEO plus 5 encyclopedic (50 $) | 348 $ | 4 176 $ |
| D | FullSEO plus 10 encyclopedic (100 $) plus 20 network (20 $) | 620 $ | 7 440 $ |
Line B is worth attention for a company pursuing visibility in generated answers, since the five encyclopedic placements are the component most directly relevant to that goal and they add fifty dollars a month. Line C shows what a second property costs: a hundred and forty-nine dollars more monthly, because billing is per domain, with the add-on shared across the account rather than duplicated.
One property of this table matters more than any individual figure: every line is monthly rather than annual. Moving up or down is a setting, not a contract renegotiation. That changes the character of the decision entirely — it does not have to be correct for a year in advance, only defensible for the next quarter. Stating that in the request removes most of the weight from the discussion, and it is routinely omitted.
By what it costs
Line A is the cheapest and line D is roughly three and a half times it. On this reading the decision is a budget question and resolves in a minute.
- Fast to decide
- Ignores the second column entirely
By what it asks of you
Line A asks for almost nothing and line D asks for a scheduled half hour every week. On this reading the decision is a capacity question and resolves differently.
- Slower to decide
- Predicts which line survives the year
Translating the gap into the currency that matters
The distance between line A and line D is 451 dollars a month, or 5 412 dollars across a year. Expressed in the second column instead: it is roughly the cost of one engineering day a month at a normal contract rate, and it buys back several hours of attention plus access to people you could not otherwise employ.
Buy the attention back
When founder time is the binding constraint and revenue is not, the higher line is the cheaper one in real terms. The surcharge is small relative to what an hour of that time produces.
- Requires a named owner anyway
- Half an hour weekly, scheduled
Buy the smallest line that runs twelve months
When the constraint is months of funding rather than hours, a line that survives a budget review beats a larger one that does not.
- Reaches the point of judgement
- Produces an answer rather than a charge
Most early companies are short of both, which is why the question cannot be answered generically. What can be said is that the two constraints point in opposite directions, and that a team which has not decided which one binds will keep relitigating the choice every quarter without new information.
A useful forcing question: if this line were doubled tomorrow, would the decision change? If not, the fee is not the constraint and the discussion should move to the second column immediately. If yes, the runway is the binding constraint and the smallest viable line is the correct answer regardless of what the larger one offers. Either way the question resolves in under a minute and prevents an hour of circular argument. Reviewing both lines side by side in a single account at least keeps the two columns visible at the same time.
What happens inside the year
Payment starts immediately, delivery does not. That gap causes most premature cancellations, and it arrives at the worst possible moment: money spent before anything could have shown.
The metric that matters also moves. Early on only coverage responds quickly enough to be worth watching. Positions become readable next, then visits, and finally enquiries with traceable origin. Reporting whichever number happened to move is the surest way to make a working programme look ineffective, and the project log in one workspace records the sequence with dates so the year-end conversation is short.
What this actually gets compared against
- Another month of paid acquisition. The comparison that gets made in practice, and on that basis the annual figure barely registers. Saying so directly shortens the meeting considerably.
- Doing nothing and relying on referrals. Costs zero on paper. The price appears as buyers who never made contact, and they do not show up in any report.
- An agency retainer. Works while the person handling it understands the product. One who has to learn it generates more internal work than it removes.
- Several separate tool licences. Data sits in separate interfaces, and a noticeable share of scarce time goes to reconciling columns rather than deciding anything.
The last item is heavier for a small team than a large one. Reporting in one tool, positions in a second and alerts in a third costs about a working day a month in reconciliation. A single workspace removes that step: more than thirty-five surfaces and eleven connected services behind one sign-in, with Google connected through a single authorisation covering mail, Search Console and Analytics.
Three of those four alternatives demand recurring attention and the fourth produces recurring cost with nothing left behind. So the comparison is rarely between prices — it is between kinds of burden, and in a company where attention is scarcer than money the option with the fewest recurring meetings tends to win. That is not an argument that one is cheaper; it is an argument that the cheaper-looking option frequently is not.
One check that precedes everything
Ordering a tier while your own pages are not reliably recorded wastes half a year. Settling it takes a morning and covers three questions: does the text arrive in the delivered source, has it been picked up, and are the pages distinct enough from one another to stand separately?
Running that check against your own numbers rather than an example table happens in the same place the reporting lives. Three questions come before the money question: whether pages are delivered and recorded cleanly, which a technical review settles; which queries are realistically reachable, which keyword research answers; and which topics deserve a page at all, which belongs to content strategy. Where the link profile is part of the plan, link building belongs in the same preliminary pass. Both tiers run through the same interface, so moving between them is a setting rather than a migration.
Work out your own annual figure
Questions from founders and finance
Is billing per domain or per account?
Per domain. A company with a main site and a separate domain for a second product pays twice — 298 dollars monthly on the entry tier, 3 576 across a year. Administration stays in one place regardless, with labels acting as filters across every view.
Why is line B only 600 dollars a year above line A?
Because five encyclopedic placements cost fifty dollars a month and the network component is identical in both. Fifty dollars monthly is six hundred over twelve months, and it buys the component most relevant to being cited in generated answers. As a first test of whether that channel does anything for you, it is the cheapest available.
Are 500 network placements five times as effective as 100?
No. The number counts placements, not their quality, and higher steps tend to increase the share of weaker sources. In a young field where the queries are not heavily contested, the smaller step is sufficient and leaves budget for the pages themselves, which is where the real constraint sits.
Does the full tier make sense without a marketing hire?
Only with a named person and a scheduled half hour each week. Without one the built-in fallback takes over, automatic selection resumes, and the annual surcharge of 4 212 dollars buys control nobody exercises. With one it can pay for itself inside the first year, provided that person knows the business well enough to order queries by deal value.
Can we stop after six months?
Possible, and usually the worst available choice. Six months produces position movement and almost never a defensible statement about enquiries. A company that can only fund half a year is better off taking the smallest line and running it for twelve: lower total spend, and an answer at the end instead of a charge.
How do we account for our own hours in this?
Pick a rate — what an hour of that person's time produces, not what it costs — and add it to the monthly figure. Doing this once usually reverses the intuitive ranking of the options, because the cheapest line in dollars is rarely the cheapest once the second column is included. It is a five-minute calculation and almost nobody performs it.