Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the listing and SEO work personally. No junior handoff.

What Helium 10 actually is, and what it actually costs

Before I make any claim about being cheaper, I want to put Helium 10 on the table accurately, because half of the comparisons floating around the internet quote prices that were retired months ago. Everything in this section is per their site as I read it in June 2026; if you are reading this later, check helium10.com before you trust the numbers.

Helium 10 is a software suite for Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop sellers. Per their site, the suite includes tools like Black Box for product research, Magnet and Cerebro for keyword research, Xray for competitor analysis, Scribbles for listing copywriting, plus modules for PPC, inventory, refunds, and review automation. It is, by most accounts, the deepest seller-side data tool on the market, and it has earned its reputation.

What it is not is a person who does the work. It is a license to do the work yourself, faster than you could without it.

Per their pricing page in June 2026, here is the lineup:

• Free tier — limited access to most tools, useful for testing the platform.
• Platinum — $129 a month month-to-month, or $99 a month billed annually (per their site, June 2026). The entry paid tier.
• Diamond — $359 a month month-to-month, or $279 a month billed annually (per their site, June 2026). The plan most established sellers I talk to actually use.
• Enterprise — starts at $1,499 a month billed annually (per their site, June 2026), aimed at large operations.

The previously available Starter plan is no longer listed on their pricing page as of my June 2026 check. The cheapest paid entry point on their site is now Platinum, which is roughly three times the price of the retired Starter (est. comparison to historical Starter pricing). For sellers who joined Helium 10 years ago at the lower tier, recent pricing has been a real adjustment.

The honest math on “cheaper than Helium 10”

This is where most comparison pages get sloppy, so let me be careful. There are three ways a seller can be paying for Amazon listing and SEO work, and only one of them is a clean apples-to-apples comparison with my pricing.

Software only, you do all the work. Helium 10 Platinum at $99 a month billed annually (per their site, June 2026) is genuinely cheaper than hiring me. If you are a hands-on seller with the time, the patience, and the appetite to learn Cerebro and Black Box yourself, the software-only path costs less in cash than my $1,500 a month flat. It costs more in your hours, but cash is cash. I will not pretend a $99 subscription costs the same as a $1,500 retainer.

Software plus a freelancer or VA running it. This is where the comparison gets interesting. Diamond at $279 a month billed annually (per their site, June 2026) plus a competent Amazon freelancer or VA at $1,500 to $4,000 a month (est.) lands you somewhere between $1,800 and $4,300 a month total, before either party has thought about your off-Amazon brand site. My $1,500 a month flat covers the human work end-to-end, no separate software line item required, because my own research stack handles the data side.

Full Amazon agency. Established Amazon agencies typically quote in the low to mid four figures per month at a minimum (est.), often with 6 to 12 month contracts, and they almost always pay for Helium 10 (or a competitor like Jungle Scout) as part of their internal stack. You are paying for the software twice in effect: once inside their retainer, and again in the markup. My pricing is $1,500 a month flat, no contract, with the senior person doing the work directly. That is not cheaper than every agency on every line item, but it is cheaper than most senior Amazon retainers I have seen quoted.

So is my service “cheaper than Helium 10”? Per their site in June 2026, against the Platinum entry plan alone, no, $99 a month annually is less than $1,500 a month. Against the Diamond plan plus the freelancer or agency most sellers end up needing to operate it, yes, comfortably and consistently. The right question is not “what does the software cost,” it is “what does it cost to actually get the work done,” and on that question the math usually breaks my way.

Want a quick check on whether you actually need a tool subscription, an agency, or just me? Book the free 30-minute audit, where I will open your listings live, look at where the orders are leaking, and tell you the honest answer.

When Helium 10 is the right call (and I will tell you so on the audit)

I lose money saying this, and I am going to say it anyway, because the long game of recommending the right tool is worth more than the short game of converting every audit. Helium 10 is a strong product, and there are seller profiles where it is genuinely the better spend than hiring me.

You are a hands-on operator who likes the software. Some sellers love research tools. They open Cerebro the way other people open ESPN. If that is you, Helium 10 at Platinum or Diamond (per their site, June 2026) puts the data you crave at your fingertips, and you will use it weekly. Hiring me to run a tool you would happily run yourself is buying a chauffeur for a car you love to drive. I will not pitch you on it.

You are validating your first product. Pre-launch product research, where you are deciding whether to source a new SKU at all, is exactly what Black Box and Xray are built for. You are not yet at the stage where you need a person to optimize copy and chase keyword rank, because you do not have a live listing. Their free tier or Platinum (per their site, June 2026) is often enough to get you to a go or no-go decision.

Your catalog is huge and your team already exists. A 500-SKU operation with a marketing employee on staff and an in-house copywriter is exactly the buyer Helium 10 Diamond or Enterprise is built for (per their site, June 2026). Your bottleneck is data velocity, not a missing person. Software solves that. My founder-led model is better for the small to mid-sized seller who is the team.

You want self-service PPC and inventory tooling. Helium 10’s Adtomic and inventory modules (per their site) handle workflows I do not run for clients. If those are your daily pain points, the software is doing work I would not be doing for you anyway.

If any of those four describe you, I will say so on the audit. Telling a seller they should subscribe to a tool instead of hiring me has cost me real revenue over 9 years. It is also one of the reasons the sellers I do take stay.

When I am the better call

The opposite profile is the one I see most often, and it is where the value of a person over a tool is most obvious.

You bought Helium 10 and stopped logging in. This is the most common situation by a wide margin. The seller subscribed during a launch push, used Cerebro for two weeks, got busy with order volume, and now pays $99 to $279 a month (per their site, June 2026) for a tool that opens once a quarter. The honest cost of that tool, divided by the work it actually produced this year, is enormous. Switching to a person who uses their own research stack and produces deliverables every month is almost always the better deal.

Your listings have been the same for a year. Software cannot rewrite your titles, your bullets, or your A+ content for you. It can suggest keywords. The actual copy, the angle, the lifestyle benefits, the objection handling, has to be written by a person who understands your buyer. That is the work I am hired for.

You sell on Amazon but also have a brand site, and the brand site is a ghost town. Helium 10 is an Amazon-side suite. It does not rank your shopify or wordpress brand site, build the SEO content that captures upper-funnel search, or earn the off-Amazon traffic that increasingly matters to Amazon’s own ranking signals (est.). That is where I spend a meaningful share of my time for Amazon sellers, and where the software cannot help.

You want to stop being the person doing it. Many sellers I talk to are good operators who have outgrown being their own marketer. They do not want another tool that reminds them of the work they are not doing; they want the work done. My $1,500 a month flat is the work, not the reminder.

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

I publish my prices because almost nobody in this category does, and the opacity costs sellers weeks of quote-form back-and-forth. The full tier breakdown is on my pricing page. Here is what the Amazon-focused version of the SEO program looks like in practice.

The $1,500 a month flat is month-to-month with no contract, so you can leave the moment the work stops earning its keep, and everything I built, the listing rewrites, the keyword research documents, the brand-site pages, the schema, stays with your business. Compare that to Helium 10’s best per-month pricing, which per their site in June 2026 requires you to commit to a year up front to get the annual discount. Both pricing models are legitimate. They just answer different questions.

How my research stack replaces the Helium 10 dependency

A common worry I hear: if I do not subscribe to Helium 10, am I missing data? Fair question, and worth answering directly.

I do not have a magic feed that Amazon does not see. Nobody does. What I have is a research workflow built around publicly available data, Amazon’s own search and category surfaces, and a stack of tools I already pay for as part of my overhead, not yours. For Amazon-side keyword and competitor work I can pull search intent, related queries, and competitor positioning without putting another line item on your card. For the off-Amazon side, where Helium 10 does not operate, my SEO stack is the right tool anyway.

The point is not that my data is identical to Helium 10’s, because no two research stacks are identical. The point is that the strategic decisions I make for you, which keywords to target, which listings to rewrite first, what your A+ content should argue, are the same decisions whether the underlying number was pulled from Cerebro or from my stack. Sellers who fixate on the tool brand are often the same sellers who do not act on the data once they have it. Sellers who act on the data win, regardless of the tool brand.

If you already pay for Helium 10 and like it, I will use what you have. If you do not, we are not adding a subscription on top of my retainer just because the category convention assumes it.

Honest benchmarks for Amazon listing and SEO work

Nobody can promise a timeline, but after 9 years I can tell you the ranges I typically see for Amazon sellers. All estimates, all dependent on your starting point, your category, and your existing review base.

The honest caveat: Amazon’s algorithm is opaque and changes without notice, your category may be much harder or much easier than the median, and any agency or freelancer who promises you a specific rank by a specific date is selling you a story. The work is the work; the timeline bends around it.

Why a remote founder instead of a big Amazon agency or another tool subscription

The economics answer half of it. I am one senior person without an office or a sales team to feed, which is why the program starts at $1,500 a month flat instead of the several thousand a comparable senior Amazon retainer runs (est.). The other half is the work itself. With me you get the person doing the work, not a software dashboard you are expected to operate or a junior account manager learning your category on your dime.

What you give up is a logo wall and a SaaS interface. What you get is the senior operator. My track record is public and checkable, not a slide deck: 37 five-star reviews on Upwork, Top Rated Plus status, 97% job success across 222 completed jobs, 9 years of doing SEO and content work for small and mid-sized businesses myself. If you want the same founder-led pitch applied to a different competitor, I wrote up the comparable case against a household-name SEO shop in my guide to being cheaper than Neil Patel Digital. Same flat pricing, same lack of contract, same person doing the work.

Who I am NOT for in this market

I turn down a meaningful share of inquiries, and I would rather tell you here than waste your call. If you love your Helium 10 subscription and you actually use it every week, keep it; you do not need me. If your real bottleneck is inventory or fulfillment, not listings or marketing, fix that first; better listings on a stockout do not help. If you want a guaranteed rank by a guaranteed date, I will not give one, and anyone who will is lying to you. If your catalog is so large and your team so structured that you need a full agency with PPC ops and inventory analysts, I am not that, and I will tell you on the call.

I also will not give medical, financial, or other regulated-category advice on the audit; for medspa or supplement sellers I always recommend running marketing claims past a qualified professional before publishing. The marketing work I do is conservative and consult-friendly by default.

I cap my 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 directly competing Amazon brands in the same category.

Frequently asked questions: cheaper than Helium 10