Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the SaaS SEO work personally. No junior handoff, no account manager between us.

The pricing reality, side by side

I want to put the actual numbers on the page before anything else, because the entire reason you searched for a cheaper SEO agency than Directive is that the gap matters to your runway. Everything in the comparison below about Directive comes from their own site, Crunchbase, and third-party reviews surfaced in a June 2026 search; I will flag estimates explicitly.

On the published Startup tier alone, my SEO is more than 4x cheaper than Directive’s. On a $20,000-a-month mid-market engagement (est.), it is more than 13x cheaper. That gap is not me being clever. It is the difference between one senior person and a 50-person agency with an Irvine office and a sales floor (per their site, June 2026). Both can be correct prices. They are not correct for the same buyer.

When Directive is the right call (and I will say so)

I would rather lose your business on this page than lose it three months into a retainer where I was not the right fit. So let me describe, plainly, the buyer Directive is built to serve.

You are a B2B SaaS at mid-market or enterprise scale. Per their site and Crunchbase in June 2026, Directive is positioned around B2B SaaS, with reported clients like ZoomInfo and Tiger Global portfolio companies. If your ARR is sitting at $5M or above (est., per their positioning), if your sales motion involves enterprise deals with months-long cycles, and if your competitors are running mature content engines against you, Directive is in the conversation for a reason.

You have an in-house marketing leader who needs to manage one agency, not five. The whole pitch of a full-funnel agency is that one team owns SEO, paid media, CRO, and content as one program against one set of goals. That is a real value when your VP Marketing or Head of Demand cannot afford to coordinate four vendors. If that is your org chart, paying a single shop to run the whole funnel can make sense even at $15,000 to $40,000 a month (est., per third-party reviews).

You have paid media budget that needs senior management alongside SEO. Directive is widely reported (per third-party reviews, June 2026) to expect meaningful ad spend budgets for the paid side of their engagements, with recommended minimums around $10,000 to $20,000 a month for Google Ads alone (est.). If you are already spending at that level on paid and you want it managed by the same agency running your SEO, that is a coherent buy. I do not run paid media. I will not pretend to.

You need the apparatus, not just the work. Quarterly business reviews. Named account team. Dashboards. Slack channels. A vendor-management process your CFO recognizes. These have real value at certain sizes, and they have real cost. If your stage demands them, pay for them. If your stage does not demand them, you should not be paying for them, and that is the part of the market this page is written for.

Your competitive set is itself running agency-grade programs. If the SaaS companies you compete with for the same buying committee are visibly running content engines, paid programs, conference circuits, and analyst relationships in lockstep, you are not in a market where a founder-led shop is the right answer for the SEO leg. That competitive picture is reasonably common at Series C and beyond, and almost never true under Series A. Pay attention to where you actually sit on that curve, not where the pitch decks pretend you sit.

If any of those describe you, I would tell you on the free consultation call to talk to Directive, or a peer of theirs. I am not in the business of selling you the wrong agency. The clients I do take refer me, in large part, because the ones I sent elsewhere remember that I sent them elsewhere honestly.

When a cheaper SEO agency than Directive is the right call

Now the other side. Here is who I am built for, and where Directive’s price tag becomes overhead you do not yet need.

You are a SaaS founder or bootstrapped startup pre-Series B. Your runway matters more than your account team. You need a clean technical foundation, a real content engine, and someone senior who will actually open Search Console and the site every week. At $1,500 a month flat, that is twelve months of senior SEO for less than two months of Directive’s published Startup tier (est., per their site). The math is the entire point.

Your real bottleneck is execution, not coordination. A lot of SaaS owners think they need a full-funnel agency when what they actually need is for somebody to ship the technical fixes, write the briefs, and chase the schema. If your SEO is broken because nothing is getting done, not because the strategy is wrong, you do not need a 50-person team to fix it. You need one senior person who does the work and reports back honestly.

You want to keep paid media and CRO decisions in-house, or with specialists. Plenty of strong SaaS programs run with SEO at one shop, paid at another, and CRO either in-house or with a specialist. The bundled-agency pitch is real, but so is the unbundled stack, especially when you want full control over each channel and you do not want your SEO retainer subsidizing somebody else’s paid media operation.

You want to actually talk to the person doing the work. This is the one that comes up most. With me, the monthly call is with me. The emails are from me. The audit is mine. The content briefs are mine. There is no account manager between you and the person making the decisions, because the agency is the person making the decisions. For many founders, that single dynamic is worth more than the entire apparatus on the other side.

You want pricing you can put in a spreadsheet today. One of the quiet costs of evaluating a mid-market or enterprise agency is the time it takes to get a real number out of them. Per third-party reviews of Directive in June 2026, public pricing is not listed on their site, which is standard at that tier; getting a quote means a discovery call, a scoping conversation, and then a custom proposal. That is reasonable for what they sell, and it is also a meaningful tax on founders who are still deciding whether they can afford SEO at all. My pricing lives on a public page. You can build the line item in your model in five minutes without taking a call, and the call is for whether we are a fit, not for what the number is.

You want to keep the work if you ever leave. Everything I build, the technical fixes, the page rewrites, the schema, the briefs, the content, lives on your domain in your stack from day one. There is no agency-side platform you are renting access to. If you cancel in month four, you keep everything I shipped in months one through three, and the SEO equity stays with your business rather than walking out with the vendor.

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

Because the natural worry when somebody is meaningfully cheaper is that the scope is also meaningfully thinner, let me put the actual scope on the page.

Technical SEO ownership. Crawl, index coverage, internal linking, redirect hygiene, canonical and hreflang correctness if relevant, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, page templates, JavaScript rendering checks where the stack demands it. Reviewed monthly, fixed as issues appear, not stockpiled into a quarterly slide.

On-page and content optimization. Existing-page rewrites for queries you already rank for and could rank better for, content briefs for new pages built around real intent and your actual buyer, schema implementation, structured data validation, and review of every piece before it ships. I have published 683 posts on my own site in the last year, so the content-engine muscle is the same one I will point at yours.

Search Console and analytics, monthly. Real review of impressions, clicks, query movement, page performance, and crawl errors. A monthly note in plain English: what moved, what did not, what we are doing about it. Not a templated PDF.

A monthly call with me. Not an account manager. Not a junior. The person doing the work, on the call, with the data open.

Same price in month twelve as month one. $1,500 a month flat. No setup fee. No annual escalator. No surprise change orders. The full pricing breakdown across services lives on my pricing page, and the deeper service detail lives on the SEO services page.

The case-study problem, and how I would honestly compare

Directive’s case studies (per their site, June 2026) feature B2B SaaS brands at scale, with mature funnels, sales teams, brand pull, and paid budgets already firing. That is a real outcome, and I am not going to wave it off. What I will say is that a cheaper SEO agency than Directive should not be evaluated against those case studies as if you are about to plug into one. They reflect what their typical client looks like, not what your starting point predicts.

The fair way to compare is your starting point against your goals. If your SaaS site has weak schema, thin templates, no internal link strategy, no consistent content cadence, and Search Console errors nobody has triaged, the first wave of work is the same wave any honest senior SEO would run. It is not a $20,000-a-month wave. It is a $1,500-a-month wave that needs to be done well for a year. After that year, if the program has earned its keep, we talk about what comes next. Maybe that conversation includes growing your in-house team. Maybe it includes graduating to a bigger agency. Either is fine. The goal is your business growing, not me keeping the retainer forever.

What you give up by going cheaper, named honestly

I have no interest in pretending a $1,500-a-month founder-led shop is the same product as a $20,000-a-month full-service agency. The honest list of what you give up by choosing me over Directive:

You give up multi-channel under one roof. If you want SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, CRO, and creative all bundled, I do not do that. You will either run those in-house or hire specialists.

You give up a named account team. You get me. For some founders that is the upside. For some buyers it is the downside, especially if your procurement process expects a vendor with a named CSM, a named strategist, a named analyst, and a SOW that reads like an enterprise contract.

You give up the brand-name logo. When you tell your board “we hired Directive,” that sentence carries air. When you tell your board “we hired a founder-led shop at $1,500 a month,” that sentence requires you to also share the work. Sometimes that is fine. Sometimes it is not the fight you want.

You give up size-related capacity. A 50-person team can absorb a hundred-page technical migration in a sprint. I cannot. I cap my client list precisely so I can do senior work for all of it, which means at certain enterprise-scale scopes, I am not the right fit on capacity alone.

If reading that list made you think “yes, I actually do need those things,” Directive or another mid-market agency is the answer. If reading it made you think “I do not need any of that yet, I just need the work done well,” you are in the right place.

About me, in plain numbers

I am Mandeep Singh, founder of Sprout Sage Solutions. I have been doing SEO and digital work for 9 years. My public, checkable track record is on Upwork: 37 five-star reviews, Top Rated Plus status, 97% job success score, across 222 completed jobs. That is the same record you can verify in five minutes before any call. I am one senior person, not a 50-person agency, and the pricing is built around that reality. The full reviews page aggregates what clients have said in their own words, and a slightly different angle on the same comparison logic lives on my cheaper SEO agency than Neil Patel Digital page.

Who I am NOT for

I turn down a meaningful share of inquiries, and I would rather say it here than waste your call. If your company is an enterprise B2B SaaS that needs a full-funnel agency running SEO, paid, CRO, and creative under one roof, I am not your fit and Directive or a peer is. If your procurement process requires a 50-person vendor with named account roles and quarterly business reviews, I will not pass that bar, and that is fine. If you want guaranteed rankings, I will not give them, and any agency at any price who does is selling you a story. If your real problem is that nobody internally has time to act on SEO recommendations, more agency spend will not fix that; senior execution will, which is what I do.

Telling buyers they need someone else 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 Directive