In a city where a four-person practice can spend more on one month of rent than on a year of anything else it buys, $149 a month is not the number that decides this. What decides it is whether one person can reliably give the campaign an hour a week.
That is an unusual way to open a piece about pricing, and it is the honest one. Both tiers below are cheap relative to every other line on a San Francisco profit and loss, and neither works unattended. The comparison worth making is not $149 against $500 — it is what each tier asks of you, and whether you can supply it.
The price difference is real and it is not the constraint
Run the arithmetic on a small practice or a residential trade business here. Rent, payroll, insurance and the vehicle or the office fit-out consume nearly everything. Against those, the gap between the two tiers is a rounding difference — noticeable on a spreadsheet, invisible in a cash-flow crisis, and not the reason a campaign succeeds or fails.
What is scarce is attention. The owner runs the business, does the work, chases invoices and handles the client whose project went sideways. An hour a week sounds trivial until you try to place it in an actual week. And this software, like all software of its kind, converts attention into results at a far better rate than it converts money into results.
- Decide the time first. Establish who gives the campaign an hour, on which day, before deciding what to spend. If nobody can, that answer changes which tier makes sense.
- The cheaper tier with attention wins. AutoSEO reviewed weekly outperforms FullSEO ignored for a quarter, every time, and it is not close.
- Automation still needs a decision-maker. The system proposes keywords and changes; somebody who knows what the business currently sells has to accept or refuse them.
- Neglect is expensive at any price. Twelve months of unreviewed spend buys a report nobody read and a keyword set that drifted away from your actual work.
AutoSEO and FullSEO, side by side
Both tiers are priced per domain per month. That matters immediately for anyone running two brands, a legacy site and a new one, or a practice plus a booking site — the figure multiplies by domains, not by users.
AutoSEO — the campaign runs itself, you approve
For a business that can supply judgment weekly but cannot supply hours.
- Keywords found and prioritized automatically. Candidates surface from your own data and from the live results page; your job is to accept, refuse or defer each one.
- Backlinks built automatically. Placements go out across a partner network of more than 230,000 websites without you choosing individual donors.
- On-site suggestions from the model. Proposed changes to your pages, delivered as recommendations you implement or ignore.
- Full analytics and a live assistant. The Search Console and results-page views come with the tier, alongside Stream, the chat attached to the project feed.
FullSEO — the same engine, plus people and control
For a business with either a specific strategy of its own or nobody available to run one.
- Manual keyword selection, with automatic fallback. You choose the terms deliberately; where you do not, the automatic selection continues underneath rather than stopping.
- Manual backlink placement with a DR target. Placements can be aimed at a stated Domain Rating rather than accepted as the network offers them.
- Human review mode for on-site changes. Proposed edits pass a person before they reach your site, which is the difference that matters on a regulated or licensed practice.
- A team behind the automation. SEO specialists, developers and writers, which is what the additional $351 a month is actually buying.
| Capability | AutoSEO · $149 | FullSEO · $500 |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword discovery | Automatic, prioritized for you | Manual selection, automatic fallback |
| Backlink placement | Automatic across the network | Manual, with a Domain Rating target |
| On-site changes | AI suggestions you apply yourself | Human review before anything ships |
| Analytics and rank tracking | Included in full | Included in full |
| Live assistant | Included | Included |
| People involved | You | Specialists, developers and writers |
Where the terms come from, and where your hour goes
The keyword pool draws on three inputs and merges them into a single queue. Your Search Console record contributes the phrasings people already used to reach you. The live results page contributes what is currently being contested. Your own seed terms contribute what the business knows about itself and no data source can supply — the service you launched last month, the client type you want more of.
Then every candidate is handled individually. Approve it, reject it, or set it aside for later. That approval queue is the hour. Not the dashboards, not the reports, not the assistant: the queue.
Your own search record
Phrasings that already produced appearances or clicks for your domain. Reliable, because these are things real people typed, and conservative, because they describe where you already are.
- Grounded in observed behavior
- Blind to demand you never served
The live results page
What competitors currently hold and what the contested space looks like. This is where terms you have never ranked for enter the queue.
- Shows the space you are absent from
- Includes terms you should refuse
Seeds you supply
The terms only you know matter. A trade that changed, a certification obtained, a client segment you are deliberately chasing this year.
- The only input carrying strategy
- Accepted in batches through Stream
One decision per candidate
Nothing enters the campaign without passing you. Approved terms get worked; rejected ones stop; deferred ones wait without cluttering the active set.
- Approve, reject or defer
- Deferral is the underused option
This matters more here than elsewhere because of the churn. A term that made sense last spring can describe a client category that has since thinned out — a startup segment that shrank, an office that closed, work that moved out of the city. The queue is where you notice, and only if you read it. An unattended queue keeps working terms that stopped meaning anything, which is a slower and costlier failure than not running a campaign at all.
What the mode switch in FullSEO actually changes
The distinctive thing about the higher tier is not that it does more. It is that it lets you take the wheel selectively, and hands control back where you do not want it. Three switches, and each one costs you time when flipped toward manual.
- Keyword mode. Choose terms yourself, and where you have not chosen, automatic selection carries on underneath. The campaign never stalls because you were busy.
- Placement mode. Direct backlink placements at a Domain Rating target instead of taking what the network allocates. Slower, more selective, and only worth it if you have a view on what quality means for your sector.
- Review mode. On-site changes wait for a human before going live. For a licensed practice — legal, medical, financial — this is frequently the whole reason to be on this tier.
Read those honestly against your own situation. Manual keyword selection is worth paying for when you know something the data does not, and worth nothing when you do not. Review mode is worth paying for when a wrong sentence on your site creates a compliance problem, and worth little when it creates only an awkward paragraph.
Wikipedia slots and PBN slots, and what volume does not buy
Two add-ons sit on top of either tier, priced per slot, and both are small enough that the temptation is to take the largest quantity without thinking. Resist that on one of them in particular.
Wikipedia slots
Sold in fixed quantities: none, one, five or ten.
- Four quantities, not a slider. Zero, one, five or ten. Ten slots is $100 a month on top of whichever tier you are on.
- Relevance is the whole game. A placement only makes sense where your business genuinely belongs in the context. There is no volume argument here at all.
- Most small practices need very few. For a local trade or a four-person firm, the honest answer is often zero or one.
PBN slots
Sold in fixed quantities: none, twenty, one hundred or five hundred.
- Four quantities again. Zero, twenty, one hundred or five hundred — so $0, $20, $100 or $500 a month respectively.
- The largest tier costs as much as FullSEO. Five hundred slots is $500 a month, which is the entire higher tier. That comparison should slow anybody down.
- Start at the bottom. Twenty slots at $20 a month is enough to see whether anything moves before committing further.
Twelve months, costed out: a Sunset contractor
Take a residential general contractor in the Sunset. One domain, one owner who does estimates all day, one office administrator who can be handed a recurring half-hour task. They start cautiously, get comfortable around the half-year mark, and step up.
| Months | Line item | Monthly | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–6 | AutoSEO, one domain | $149 | $894 |
| 7–12 | FullSEO, one domain | $500 | $3,000 |
| 4–12 | PBN, 20 slots | $20 | $180 |
| 8 and 11 | Wikipedia, 1 slot | $10 | $20 |
| — | Twelve-month total | — | $4,094 |
Check it: six months at $149 is $894, six at $500 is $3,000, nine months of the smallest PBN quantity at $20 is $180, and two single Wikipedia slots at $10 is $20. Those four figures sum to $4,094, which averages $341 across the year — a shade over twice the entry price, and still well under the higher tier taken from month one, which would have been $6,000 before any add-ons.
The instructive part of the table is not the total. It is the last tile: twenty-six hours across the year at half an hour a week, plus twelve more if the monthly report is genuinely read. That is the resource the contractor has to find, and it is the one that fails first when a job runs late — which in this trade is most weeks.
How long before any of this means anything
First measurable movement typically arrives four to eight weeks in. Both words in that phrase carry weight, because misreading them is how campaigns get cancelled in month three.
Measurable means visible in the data — a term entering the top thirty, impressions appearing on phrasings that had none. It does not mean enquiries. And typically means what it says: a competitive term in a dense professional category can take considerably longer, and some never arrive at all.
| Window | What can reasonably be judged | What cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1–4 | Setup is correct, campaign is running | Anything about results |
| Weeks 4–8 | First movement in tracked positions | Whether it converts |
| Months 3–6 | Direction on the approved keyword set | Return on the spend |
| Months 6–12 | Whether enquiries changed shape | Attribution to any single lever |
Where campaigns get cancelled
Enough has happened to look at, not enough to conclude anything. Owners who expected enquiries stop here, usually one month before the data would have said something.
- Judge setup and movement only
- Do not judge return yet
Where the decision belongs
A full year covers seasonality, a full keyword cycle, and enough approvals and rejections that the active set reflects what the business actually sells today.
- Compare named terms, not totals
- Then change tier, if at all
Twelve months is the honest evaluation window, and it is longer than most owners want to hear. It is also why the tier decision should be made once and left alone: switching every quarter to chase a number resets the thing you were measuring. Pick a tier you can sustain for a year without resenting it.
Questions owners ask before signing up
We have two domains. Does one subscription cover both?
No — both tiers are priced per domain. Two domains on the entry tier is $298 a month, not $149. Before paying twice, ask whether the second domain should exist at all. Two sites covering the same services frequently compete with each other, and consolidating is cheaper than promoting both.
Can we start on the lower tier and move up later?
That is the sequence in the worked example above, and it is usually the sensible one. Six months on the entry tier tells you whether anyone in the business will actually engage with the queue. If the answer turns out to be no, the higher tier with its team is a reasonable response to that finding — and if the answer is yes, you may find you no longer need it.
Nobody here has an hour a week. What then?
Then be honest that you are buying a managed service rather than a tool, and price accordingly. The higher tier exists partly for this case, since it brings specialists, developers and writers alongside the automation. What does not work is buying the entry tier, assigning it to nobody, and concluding a year later that automated SEO does not work.
Are the add-ons worth taking at all?
Take the smallest PBN quantity if you want to see the mechanism, and treat editorial placements as a relevance question rather than a quantity one. Neither add-on rescues a campaign whose keyword set is wrong, and both are easier to justify in month six, once the approved terms have settled, than in month one.
Our client base changes constantly. Does an automated campaign cope?
Only through the queue, and only if somebody is reading it. The automatic sources see search behavior, not your order book — they cannot know that a category of client largely left the city. Your seed terms and your rejections are the mechanism for telling the campaign what changed, and they are the part that stops working when nobody looks.
Which tier suits which business
The entry tier suits a business with an owner or administrator who will genuinely spend half an hour a week on the queue, a single domain, and no compliance obligation over what appears on the site. Most local trades and most small practices are in that group, whatever their revenue. Nothing about the higher price makes the higher tier a better fit for them.
The higher tier suits two quite different businesses. One has a specific strategy of its own — a partner who knows exactly which terms matter and wants placements aimed at a Domain Rating rather than allocated — and is paying for control. The other has nobody available at all and is paying for the team. Both are legitimate; they are simply not the same purchase, and it is worth knowing which one you are making.
A last note on the arithmetic. Whichever tier you choose, the annual figure lands somewhere between roughly $1,800 and $6,000 before add-ons — a range that, on almost any San Francisco cost base, is decided by a shrug rather than a board meeting. Which is precisely why the decision gets made carelessly. The scarce input is the half-hour, so protect that and let the price follow. More of our material on reading the resulting numbers sits in the articles section, and our engagement outlines describe having the weekly pass run for you.
If it is easier to judge with the actual screens in front of you, connect a domain and open the campaign area. The tier selection, the add-on quantities and the keyword queue all sit in the same place, alongside the analytics and rank tracking that come with either tier and Stream, the assistant attached to the project feed, which takes seed keyword lists in batches. Look at the queue before you look at the price — it is the part you will either use or abandon, and everything else follows from that.