Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the SEO work personally. No junior handoff. No account manager layer.

The honest setup: who Disruptive Advertising actually is

Before claiming to be cheaper than anyone, the fair move is to show you what you would actually be buying from them. So I pulled facts only from Disruptive Advertising’s own website in June 2026, and the numbers below are reported per their site, not from third-party reviews, blog roundups, or anything I cannot verify.

Per their site, Disruptive Advertising is a full-service digital marketing agency with 160+ Employees aligned with our mission, per their site, managing Over $450+ million in annual managed ad spend, per their site, with 90+ Clients with us for 4 years or more, per their site, and 4.8 Average rating from 350+ reviews on Clutch, per their site. Their notable client list, per their site, includes brands like Adobe, Guitar Center, PennyMac, KPMG, ConocoPhillips, and Scotts Miracle-Gro. They list themselves at #145 On the Inc. 500, per their site.

On services, per their site they offer paid search, paid social, SEO, lead generation, ecommerce, Amazon marketing, lifecycle marketing, and creative services, with SEO presented as one channel inside a broader multi-channel agency. Their SEO services page, per their site, frames the offer as three tiers: a free DIY audit, a Do-It-With-Us tier described as a couple thousand dollars per their site, and a Done-For-You tier carrying the headline guarantee If we don’t move the needle in 90 days, you don’t pay, per their site. They state no long-term contracts, per their site, and emphasize a 90-day guarantee tied to qualifying brands, per their site.

That is the operating shape of the company you would be hiring. It is a real, sizeable, multi-channel agency with a serious client list. None of this page exists to dispute any of that, and you should weigh those facts carefully.

The honest setup: who I am

I am Mandeep Singh, founder of Sprout Sage Solutions. Nine years of SEO work, almost all of it done by me personally. My public, checkable record sits on Upwork: 37 five-star reviews, Top Rated Plus status, 97% Job Success Score, 222 completed jobs across small businesses, ecommerce, medspas, professional services, and a few enterprise engagements. I am not in Salt Lake City, I do not have 160 employees, I do not manage hundreds of millions in ad spend, and I am not on the Inc. 500. The point is exactly that I do not, which is the source of the price gap.

SEO at Sprout Sage Solutions is $1,500 a month flat, no contract, cancel anytime, and I personally do the strategy, the on-page work, the Google Business Profile work, the schema, the technical fixes, the content briefs, and the monthly reporting. A lead-built website is $500 one-time, a high-converting landing page is $300 one-time, and the full breakdown lives on my pricing page. Numbers are public so neither of us wastes a week of quote back-and-forth before we know whether we fit.

Side-by-side: where the price gap actually comes from

It is worth being precise about why my fee is structurally lower, because cheap can mean two very different things. Cheap can mean cutting corners on the actual work, which would be a problem. Or cheap can mean cutting overhead that the work does not require, which is just math. Mine is the second.

Headcount. Per their site, Disruptive Advertising lists 160+ Employees aligned with our mission, per their site. That is salespeople, account managers, strategists, analysts, paid-media specialists, SEO specialists, creative producers, leadership, and operations. Every retainer pays a slice of that org chart. I am one senior operator. The cost difference is not philosophy; it is salaries times headcount.

Channel surface area. Per their site, Disruptive offers paid search, paid social, SEO, lead generation, ecommerce, Amazon marketing, lifecycle marketing, and creative services, per their site. Building and maintaining that channel surface area requires specialists, tooling licenses, and capacity, all of which sit inside their fee even when you only buy SEO. I sell SEO, websites, and landing pages. No paid media, no Amazon, no lifecycle. The narrower scope is why my pricing can be tight.

Sales motion. Larger agencies run real sales teams with quotas, demos, and proposals. That cost is recovered inside the retainer. My sales motion is this page and a 30-minute call with me. There is no SDR sequence, no proposal deck, no closing call with a director. You get one conversation with the founder. That sounds like a service downgrade and is actually a cost line you stop paying for.

Account management layer. At an agency the size Disruptive describes per their site, the senior strategists typically lead kickoff and reviews, while account managers and more junior specialists run the day-to-day work. None of that is wrong; it is how agencies scale. With me there is no handoff. You email the founder; the founder does the work. For most small and mid-market SEO buyers, that is the single most undervalued line item in the comparison.

Brand premium. Per their site, Disruptive Advertising lists notable clients including Adobe, Guitar Center, PennyMac, KPMG, and ConocoPhillips. A reputation that includes those logos is a real asset, and it commands a brand premium in their pricing (est.). I do not have that brand. I have 37 five-star Upwork reviews, Top Rated Plus, and 222 completed jobs. Different proof, different price.

What you actually get for $1,500 a month flat

The fair comparison is not retainer to retainer in the abstract; it is deliverable to deliverable. Here is the standard scope at $1,500 a month with me, all flat, all included, no add-on invoices and no surprise scope creep mid-quarter.

Technical SEO foundation. Crawl audit, indexation review, Core Web Vitals work where it affects rankings, schema implementation across services and locations, internal linking architecture, and ongoing fixes as Google rolls out updates. The technical layer is where most cheap SEO programs quietly fail, and it is where I spend a disproportionate amount of the first 60 days.

On-page and content. Service pages built around your actual money jobs, location pages where you genuinely operate, optimization of existing pages that are close to ranking, and content briefs for the pieces that fit your editorial capacity. I write what you cannot, edit what you do, and stop you from publishing thin pages that drag down the rest.

Local SEO and Google Business Profile. Primary category and secondaries set correctly, service area, weekly posts where they earn their keep, review velocity that mentions the job and the suburb, response to every review within 24 hours, and Map Pack grid scans across your real service area each month. For service businesses this is often where the calls actually come from.

Reporting and the monthly call. A monthly review that shows rankings, traffic, leads, and the work that earned them. The call is with me, not a CSM. If something is not moving, I will tell you why and what changes next month. If your problem is not SEO, I will tell you that too.

Full services page, with the long version of the scope, is over on my SEO services page, and the social proof people usually want to see before any call lives on my reviews.

When Disruptive Advertising is the right call, not me

I have said no to a meaningful share of inquiries over 9 years, and several of those companies should have hired an agency exactly like Disruptive Advertising, not me. The honest signals are:

You need genuine multi-channel firepower in one shop. Paid search, paid social, SEO, Amazon, lifecycle email, and creative, all coordinated, all reporting to one account team, all able to flex budget between channels as performance shifts. Per their site Disruptive runs exactly that motion across Over $450+ million in annual managed ad spend, per their site. I do not. If you buy multi-channel from me you are stitching together specialists, which is the wrong move at scale.

Your paid budget is large enough to be the main lever. If paid media is doing the heavy revenue lifting and SEO is the supporting cast, the math favors a paid-media-first agency with strong SEO, not the other way around. Per their site Disruptive’s roots are paid; SEO is a service, but the operating muscle is paid optimization. That is the right shape for spend-driven businesses (est.).

You want a 90-day money-back guarantee structure. Per their site Disruptive offers If we don’t move the needle in 90 days, you don’t pay for the Done-For-You tier, per their site, for qualifying brands. If that structure is what makes your CFO sign the contract, it is a legitimate reason to pick them. I do not offer a guarantee like that and would not trust any SEO agency that did, but the structure has real value for buyers who need it.

You need the brand on your roster. Sometimes the agency name on the invoice matters for board meetings, investor decks, or internal politics. A 160+ employee Inc. 500 agency carries weight my one-person shop does not (est.), and that is fine.

You need account-team coverage during outages, vacations, or holidays. A one-senior-operator program has a single point of contact. That is a feature for most clients and a real risk for some. If your business cannot tolerate the operator being offline for a week, hire the agency with the bench.

If any of those describe you, close this tab and book Disruptive’s audit. I would rather you hire the right firm the first time than churn through mine in month two.

When I am the right call, not Disruptive Advertising

The mirror of that list, with the same honesty:

You want the founder doing the work. Not a senior strategist on the kickoff and a junior team on the actual deliverables. The founder, monthly, on the audit and the pages and the reporting. That is structurally hard to deliver inside a 160-person org and is the default at mine.

SEO is the core channel, not one channel of five. If you are mostly buying organic growth, Google Business Profile dominance, review velocity, schema, technical fixes, and conversion-grade pages, you do not need a multi-channel agency. You need an SEO operator. The price of the multi-channel surface area is real, and you pay it whether you use it or not.

You publish your numbers and you want the agency to publish theirs. Mine are on the public pricing page. Per their site Disruptive’s are not, as of June 2026. Both are legitimate choices for an agency to make. If transparent pricing matters to you, the choice is already made.

You want no contract, real cancellation, and to keep everything if it does not work. Per their site Disruptive states no long-term contracts, per their site, which is good. My version is operationally similar but tighter: cancel anytime by email, keep every page, every schema block, every profile improvement, every review you earned. The pages live on your domain from day one.

If you want to see how the same logic applies to other big agencies, I keep the honest comparison going at cheaper SEO agency than Neil Patel Digital, with the same per-site sourcing standard.

What the price gap looks like across a year

Disruptive Advertising does not publish a public SEO monthly fee per their site as of June 2026, so I will not invent one. What their site does say, per their site, is that the Do-It-With-Us tier is a couple thousand dollars, per their site. Industry benchmarks for full-service agency SEO retainers at the size and channel surface Disruptive describes typically sit in the several-thousand-a-month range (est.), and frequently higher for done-for-you scope at agencies of that size (est.).

My math is fixed. $1,500 a month flat, $18,000 across twelve months, no setup fee, no off-boarding fee, no add-on packages. A new website is $500 one-time on top, and a high-converting landing page is $300 one-time. Whatever the comparator number turns out to be in your actual quote from a larger agency, the per-year gap will be meaningful for most small and mid-market businesses. Run the spreadsheet on your own numbers; it is the easiest comparison anyone ever runs and the one most buyers skip.

The pieces of an SEO retainer most buyers never see priced separately

One of the reasons agency-to-agency comparisons feel slippery is that retainers bundle deliverables that, broken apart, look very different at scale. It is worth being explicit about what sits inside a $1,500 monthly invoice from me, and what tends to sit inside a larger-agency invoice, so the comparison is concrete rather than vibes.

Discovery and onboarding. At a larger agency this is typically a kickoff workshop, a documented audit, an account-team introduction, and a strategy deck, with hours from a senior strategist plus account management billed inside the first month. With me, it is a working call, a written-up audit, and a 60-day plan, done by the person who will then execute the plan. The deliverable is similar; the line items inside it are very different.

Monthly strategic review. A larger agency typically schedules a recurring call with an account manager, a quarterly business review with a senior strategist, and written reporting in between. With me there is one monthly call, with the founder, and a written report that covers the same ground without the layer. Buyers who need the formality of QBRs and account-team coverage value the larger structure; buyers who want fewer meetings and a tighter feedback loop value mine.

Specialist hours. Technical SEO, content, on-page, link-related work, local SEO, schema, conversion fixes. At a larger agency these are different specialists, often coordinated by an account manager. With me they are the same person, sequenced in the order that produces the most movement first. Neither is wrong; the trade is depth-per-discipline versus integrated execution by one head.

Tooling and licenses. Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, rank tracking, GBP grid-scan tools, schema validators, page-speed tooling. These are real line items at every agency. The cost is amortized across clients, and at a 160-person agency that amortization is wide. At mine it is narrower but still well within the $1,500 fee. The deliverables that come out are the same.

The point of itemizing this is not to claim a one-person operator can replicate every line of a 160-person agency’s retainer at $1,500. It cannot, and you should not buy it on that pretense. The point is to make the trade legible: account-team coverage, brand premium, and multi-channel surface area are real things, and they are exactly what you are not paying for at my fee. If you do not need them, you are overpaying anywhere that bundles them in.

How to do the comparison without getting sold

If you are evaluating Disruptive Advertising and me, the way to make this rigorous is to ignore the marketing copy on both sides and ask four questions of any agency you call.

Who, by name, does the day-to-day work? Get the actual person, the actual seniority, and the actual time they will spend on your account each month in writing. At a 160-person agency that is rarely the senior strategist who took the discovery call. At mine that is the founder, and you can email me to verify.

What is the published price and what triggers it changing? Mine is on the pricing page; anything you sign that is more than $1,500 a month is by mutual decision, not silent scope creep. Theirs is custom-quoted per their site; ask for a clear breakdown of what changes the number and you will learn a lot.

What happens on cancellation? Mine: cancel by email, keep everything, no off-boarding. Theirs: confirm in writing per their site that no long-term contracts means what you think it means, what the notice period is, and what assets you keep.

What is the actual guarantee structure? Per their site, Disruptive’s 90-day language is If we don’t move the needle in 90 days, you don’t pay, per their site. Ask in writing what moving the needle means in their definition, which tiers it applies to, and what qualifying brand requirements gate it. Specifics matter.

Both agencies should be able to answer all four of those in writing inside an hour. If either cannot, that is the answer.

Frequently asked questions: cheaper SEO agency than Disruptive Advertising