Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the SEO work personally. No junior handoff, no offshore team.

What Big Leap actually charges, per their site

Before I argue I am cheaper than Big Leap, I want to make sure I am quoting them fairly, because price-comparison pages get this wrong constantly. Everything in this section is from Big Leap’s own published content as of June 2026, not from rumor, not from a directory, and not from a Reddit thread.

Per Big Leap’s blog post on SEO package costs, their monthly retainers customize anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 per month, and they explicitly state that clients who spend at least $5,000 to $6,000 a month tend to see their best results. For project-based work, like a batch of local SEO location pages or a one-time campaign setup, they list the same $5,000 to $50,000 range. For content alone, one-off blog posts are listed at $225 to $400 each per their site, and multi-month content engagements run from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on deliverables.

Per their about page, Big Leap was founded in 2008 in Lehi, Utah, has grown to over 90 employees, and lists clients including BambooHR, Domo, and Purple on their Utah marketing page. Per Clutch and other agency directories, their minimum engagement is listed in the $1,000 to $10,000 range with an average hourly rate around $125, which is consistent with the customized retainer model their own site describes. They state on their site that they cannot sell a pre-packaged product at a fixed price and that pricing comes after several discussions with each client.

That is the picture, drawn entirely from what they publish. None of it is a problem; it is exactly the model a 90-plus-person agency serving brands like Domo and BambooHR has to run. The problem only starts when a founder running a $2 million local business, or a small SaaS team with no marketing department, walks into that pricing structure thinking it is the only way to buy SEO.

Where I cost less, and why the difference is structural, not a discount

I charge $1,500 a month flat for SEO. Same number whether you are in Boise, Boston, or Brisbane, whether you are a medspa, a plumber, a Shopify brand, or a SaaS founder. No contract, no setup fee, no minimum term, and the price is the same in month one and month twelve. At Big Leap’s stated entry recommendation of $5,000 to $6,000 a month per their site, my program runs at roughly a quarter of the price (est.). At their top end of $50,000 a month per their site, mine is roughly three percent of the price (est.).

That gap is not a discount and it is not a loss-leader. It is the math of two completely different agency structures.

A 90-plus-person agency funds 90-plus people. Per Big Leap’s about page, they employ over 90 staff across SEO, content, paid media, RevOps, CRO, and reputation management, plus the layers of project management, account services, and sales that a shop that size requires. None of those people are free. A $5,000-a-month client funds a slice of all of them, whether or not that client needs all of them. A $50,000-a-month client funds a much bigger slice, and at that scale it makes sense. For an enterprise SaaS with a CMO and a real in-house team, paying for a deep bench of specialists is good buying. For an SMB founder, it is paying for a team to coordinate a team.

I fund one person, me. No office in Silicon Slopes, no sales team, no account manager, no client services tier, no SDR following up after the call. My overhead is a laptop, a few subscriptions, and the time it takes me to do the work. That is the entire reason senior US-quality SEO can start at $1,500 a month here instead of $5,000. Same scope of senior work, very different overhead being passed through.

Geography matters too. I am remote, based outside the US. A US agency with a Lehi office and US-based salaries has a cost floor I do not have. That is the structural reason a founder-led remote senior can charge what a US-based 90-plus-person agency cannot.

Want a quick read on where your business stands before we ever talk? Skip straight to the live version and book the free 30-minute audit, where I will tell you on the call whether a $1,500 founder-led program or a $5,000-plus full-service agency is the better match for your situation.

What you actually get from me at $1,500 a month

I publish my scope because almost nobody at any price point does, and that opacity is how clients end up paying for things they do not need. Here is what runs every month, in the order I sequence the work.

Google Business Profile and local foundation, where applicable. Correct primary and secondary categories, accurate service areas, weekly posts, real job photos, and the fixes that actually move the Map Pack. For a local services business this is usually where call volume moves first, and per my experience it often shows in 14 to 30 days (est.) when the profile has been neglected. For a non-local business this work is skipped and the hours move to pages.

Review velocity and reputation. Job-timed review requests so they land while the customer is still happy, responses to every review within 24 hours, and steady consistency that beats raw totals against competitors with bigger backlogs. Reputation is the cheapest conversion lift in SEO and the most ignored.

Service and city pages with real local or vertical substance. Not spun templates. Not “Service in City” with the city name swapped a hundred times. Each page is built to be the best page on the internet for that specific intent, with on-page SEO, schema, internal linking, and the kind of detail Google’s quality systems are now built to reward. My full SEO methodology lives on the SEO services page; this is that method on a senior-execution budget instead of a headcount one.

Schema, AI citability, and technical hygiene. Proper Service, FAQPage, and BreadcrumbList markup. Content structured so AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity can actually quote it. Core Web Vitals checks. The boring technical layer most SMB sites quietly fail.

Monthly reporting and a call with me, not an account manager. Real numbers, real rankings, real next steps. If something is not working, I tell you, and we change the plan. If you outgrow what I can do solo, I tell you that too and refer you somewhere honest, which sometimes is a larger agency like Big Leap.

That is the $1,500 program. A website build is separate at $500, and a single landing page is $300. The full tier breakdown is on my pricing page, and every number on this site matches every number on that one.

When Big Leap is the right call

This is the section comparison pages usually skip, and skipping it is how they lose your trust. Big Leap is a real agency with real outcomes for real clients, and they are the better choice over me in several specific situations. If any of these describe you, take their call seriously instead of mine.

You are a venture-backed SaaS company or mid-market brand. If you have a CMO, a marketing ops team, paid media budgets in the tens of thousands a month, and a board that expects a recognizable agency name in the SOW, Big Leap’s model is built for that. Per their site they have worked with brands like BambooHR, Domo, and Purple, all in that league. I have not, and I will not pretend I have.

You need integrated services across multiple disciplines at once. Per Big Leap’s site, they run SEO, content marketing, paid advertising, RevOps, CRO, and reputation management as a coordinated stack. If you genuinely need all of that under one roof with one project manager, paying $5,000 to $20,000 a month for integration is rational. I run one discipline, SEO, at senior depth. If your bottleneck is coordinating five disciplines, I am not your fix.

You are a multi-location or franchise business. Per their local SEO page, Big Leap explicitly positions for multi-location and franchise growth. That kind of work, at 50, 200, or 800 locations, is a different animal from running one local services business in one metro. I take multi-location clients only up to the point where one senior person can still do the work justice; beyond that, a larger agency makes more sense.

You are buying agency presence as much as agency output. Some businesses need a logo wall, an account team with business cards, and an office to visit. That is a legitimate buying criterion in some industries. I have none of those. If they matter to your stakeholders, that is a real reason to pay more.

You have already tried solo senior contractors and outgrown them. If you have run founder-led SEO at $1,500 to $3,000 a month for a year and your bottleneck is now hours, not strategy, scaling to a 90-plus-person agency is the right next move. I will tell you that on the call instead of stretching myself thin to keep your retainer.

If none of those describe you, the rest of this page is for you.

How I rank a business at a fraction of an enterprise agency budget

The technical answer is unglamorous: by doing the work that actually moves rankings and ignoring the work that does not. Most SMB SEO overspend is not on bad work; it is on real work the business does not yet need.

Senior strategy first, headcount never. The single biggest difference between a $5,000-plus retainer and a $1,500 retainer is how many hours of junior labor sit in the middle. For most SMB and local SEO, the strategy is what moves the needle; the execution is fast once the strategy is right. I do both, so there is no translation layer where strategy gets diluted into a brief that gets diluted into a draft that gets diluted into a published page.

Page depth over page volume. Per Big Leap’s own content packages page, you can buy several months of strategic content for $5,000 to $50,000. That is appropriate for brands publishing 20-plus pieces a month. For most SMBs, three to five excellent pages a month, each built to be genuinely the best resource on its topic, outperforms thirty thin ones. I optimize for depth, and depth is cheaper to produce when one senior person does it end to end.

Map Pack and reviews before backlinks. The most expensive parts of enterprise SEO budgets, in my observation, are link building and content scale. For a local services business, neither is usually the binding constraint. Google Business Profile completeness, review velocity, and a few excellent service pages do more, faster, at a tenth of the cost. The honest version of this trade-off is on my SEO services page.

AI citability as a free upgrade. Most enterprise content pipelines were built before AI Overviews and ChatGPT search mattered. Per recent observation across my own client work, AI citation behavior rewards passage-level clarity, schema, and direct answers (est.), all of which fit perfectly into a senior-execution workflow and almost none of which require a 90-person agency.

No upsell pressure. I do not have a sales team that gets paid to expand your scope. If $1,500 a month is doing the job, $1,500 a month stays the price.

What my clients have actually paid for in the last year

I will not invent case-study revenue numbers, and I have never run a client at $5,000 a month, so I cannot compare on like-for-like outcomes against Big Leap’s stated client base. What I can show is the public record: 37 five-star Upwork reviews, Top Rated Plus status, 97% job success score across 222 completed jobs over 9 years. The full set sits on my reviews page, and Upwork’s verification means the jobs and ratings are not editable by me after the fact.

The mix of clients in those 222 jobs runs from US medspas and Shopify stores to UK service businesses to Australian SaaS founders to Indian SMBs. None of them paid $5,000 a month. Most paid $1,500 or less. Several still work with me on multi-year engagements that have rolled month to month, by their choice, with no contract holding them. If a founder-led senior remote at $1,500 a month did not work in practice, that record would not exist.

What it actually costs to work with me

Same numbers as everywhere else on this site. Everything below is flat, contract-free, and identical for clients in the US, UK, Australia, India, or anywhere else.

Versus Big Leap’s stated entry of $5,000 to $6,000 a month per their site, my full SEO program is $1,500 a month flat, and the website and landing page sit alongside it as one-time builds rather than retainer line items. If you have ever wondered why $300 buys a real landing page here when a custom one-pager elsewhere can run several thousand, the answer is the same as the retainer answer: no agency overhead in the price.

Honest benchmarks against an enterprise agency timeline

Big Leap does not publish typical timelines on their pricing post, and they are right not to; SEO timelines depend on starting point, vertical, and market. After 9 years I can tell you the ranges I typically see at my price point, and where they differ from what a $5,000-plus engagement might deliver.

The honest reading: for the senior SEO work itself, the timeline at $1,500 a month is the same as the timeline at $5,000 a month for the same scope. What a larger budget genuinely buys is breadth, more pages, more disciplines, more parallel workstreams, not faster ranking on the same page. If breadth is what your business needs, a Big Leap-sized agency is the rational buy. If depth on a smaller surface is what you need, paying for breadth you will not use is the most common SEO overspend.

Who I am NOT for

I turn down meaningful inquiries every month, and I would rather tell you here than waste your call. If you are a $50 million-plus business with an in-house team and need an agency to plug into RevOps, paid, and SEO simultaneously, I cannot staff that and Big Leap-shaped agencies can. If you need integrated paid media management on $30,000-plus monthly ad budgets, I do not run media buying at that scale and I will say so. If your stakeholders need a logo wall and a US-based account team to feel confident in the agency choice, I have neither, and that is a legitimate reason to pay more elsewhere. And I cap client load at what I can do senior-level work for, which sometimes means a short wait, and always means I will not take two competing businesses in the same local market.

Telling owners they do not need the thing they asked me to sell has cost me real revenue over 9 years. It is also why the clients I do take refer me, and why 37 of them left five-star reviews.

Frequently asked questions: cheaper SEO agency than Big Leap