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

What Single Grain actually costs, in their own listing

I started this page the way I start every comparison: by reading what the other agency publishes about itself, on their own site and on the third-party profiles they choose to verify. Single Grain does not list packaged prices on singlegrain.com (per their site, June 2026), which is normal for a mid-market shop. What they do publish, on their verified Clutch profile (per their Clutch profile, June 2026), is concrete enough to compare against honestly.

The minimum project size on that listing is $10,000+. The most common project size, according to client reviews aggregated on the same page, falls between $10,000 and $49,000. Larger engagements stretch into the $50,000 to $199,999 band. Their service mix is roughly 40% SEO, 30% pay-per-click, 20% conversion optimization, and 10% digital strategy. They run from a Los Angeles headquarters at 600 Wilshire Blvd and a San Francisco office at 425 2nd St, with employee headcount in the 10 to 49 range. Founded in 2009, with public client logos at brand-name scale.

None of that is an attack. It is a snapshot of what kind of agency Single Grain is: a mid-market, multi-discipline shop with the cost structure and team to take engagements that start in the five figures and run higher. If that matches your stage, they are a serious option, and I will say more about exactly when later on this page. The point of laying out the numbers is that you can do the math the way I do it: their floor is roughly six times my monthly rate, and their median is closer to ten or fifteen times it, depending on engagement length.

What I cost, and what is in that number

I publish my prices on the homepage and on the pricing page because the alternative, a quote form that turns into three discovery calls before you learn a number, is how most agency searches die. Here is what is real:

SEO is $1,500 a month, flat. Same price whether you are a medspa, a plumber, a Shopify brand, or a B2B SaaS startup. No tiering, no “Pro” upsell, no per-keyword surcharge. Month-to-month, cancel any time, and everything I build is yours from the day it is published.

A new website is from $500. Custom, on your domain, designed for the keywords and the calls you actually want, with on-page SEO and schema built in from the start instead of bolted on later.

A single landing page is from $300. The right tier when you are running paid traffic or pushing one campaign, do not need a full site rebuild, and want the page that converts the click.

What that $1,500 a month buys, in concrete terms, is the same fundamentals that mid-market agencies build their lower tiers on: Google Business Profile management for local businesses, on-page SEO on your existing pages, new service and city pages where the keyword research justifies them, schema and AI-citability work for the new search surfaces, technical fixes, link earning through real content rather than purchased links, monthly reporting, and a monthly call where you talk to me, not an account executive. The difference is not what is in the scope. It is what is not in the price: an LA office, a San Francisco office, a sales team, and the layer of account managers that sit between you and the senior person.

The honest side-by-side

Here is the full comparison, with the Single Grain column sourced only from what they publish themselves or list on their verified Clutch profile, as of June 2026. Estimates are flagged as such.

Notice what is not in that table: claims that one of us “delivers better results.” That depends on your starting point, your team, your patience, and the channels you actually need. What is in the table is structure, and structure is what you can verify before you sign anything.

When Single Grain is the right call (not me)

I would rather you hire the right vendor than hire me, and there is a real list of situations where the right vendor is Single Grain. If you are in one of these, hire them. I have routed founders their direction before.

You are mid-market or enterprise and need multi-channel coordination. Single Grain runs SEO, paid media, CRO, and analytics under one roof (per their site, June 2026). When you have $30,000 a month in paid spend on Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok, and you need the SEO team and the paid media team in the same Slack workspace, a multi-discipline agency saves more than it costs. I do not run that scope, and I will not pretend to.

You need brand-name social proof for internal buy-in. If your CMO needs to justify the spend to a board, and “we hired the same agency Amazon and Uber have worked with” is part of how that conversation goes (per their site, June 2026), Single Grain’s logo wall earns its keep before the work even starts. My track record is real, but it is one person’s, and it does not have a Fortune 500 logo on it.

Your budget genuinely starts at $10,000 a month and you need that pace of execution. A bigger team can deploy more bodies on a faster timeline. If your competitive landscape needs 30 service pages, 20 city pages, paid media management, and a CRO program running in parallel inside one quarter, that is not a job for one senior person. I work fast, but I am one person, and I will not lie about throughput.

You want thought leadership and content gravity as part of the package. Single Grain publishes heavily under their own brand (per their site, June 2026), and some clients value being associated with that ecosystem. That is a real benefit at a certain stage of company, and I cannot replicate it at $1,500 a month.

If any of those four describe your situation, hire them. The rest of this page is for the people none of those four describe, which is most owner-operators and SMB founders reading this.

If you are not sure which side of that line you are on, a 30-minute conversation usually clears it up. Book the free audit, and the worst case is you leave with a clearer brief for whichever agency you call next.

When I am the right call (not Single Grain)

The flip side, with the same honesty. If you are in any of these situations, a $10,000+ minimum is the wrong shape for your business right now, and a founder-led senior contractor at $1,500 a month flat is.

You are a single-location or small-multi-location service business. Medspas, dentists, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, law firms with one or two offices. The math of $10,000 a month on SEO does not pencil for a business doing $1M to $5M in annual revenue. The math of $1,500 a month flat, with Google Business Profile work and real service pages, does, and that is the bulk of who hires me.

You are an ecommerce brand under roughly $5M annual revenue. A Shopify store doing $1M to $4M needs senior SEO work on product and collection pages, schema, content, and technical hygiene, not a six-channel agency engagement. The fix is one person who knows what they are doing, paid like a senior consultant, not a six-figure annual retainer.

You are a B2B founder doing your first real SEO push. You have product, you have a handful of customers, you do not have a marketing team yet, and you need real organic search infrastructure before you scale paid. A founder-led contractor at $1,500 a month is exactly the right shape. A $10,000 minimum is overbuying for the stage you are at.

You have been burned by a junior handoff. Hired the senior on the pitch, ended up with a junior on the work, and the results came in at a junior level. That story is common, and the fix is buying senior time directly. I am the senior on the pitch and the senior on the work because there is no one else to hand it to. That is not a slogan, it is a staffing constraint, and it is the point.

You want to know your monthly number before the discovery call. Some buyers genuinely want transparent pricing, in writing, on the homepage, before they spend a minute on a call. I do. If you do too, you have already self-selected.

What you give up by hiring me instead

I would not believe this page if it did not include this section, so here it is. If you hire me over a mid-market agency like Single Grain, here is what you actually give up.

Multi-channel under one roof. I do SEO, websites, and landing pages. I do not run paid media, CRO programs, or analytics consulting as standalone services. If you want one vendor for all of that, I am not it, and I will refer you to someone who is rather than stretch into work I would not do well.

A logo wall. My case studies are owner-operator businesses and B2B SMBs, not Fortune 500 brands. If “Amazon hired them too” matters to your decision (per Single Grain’s site, June 2026, where such logos are featured), you should weight that honestly.

Throughput at scale. One senior person cannot deploy 50 pages in a month. I can build a steady, high-quality cadence that compounds, and most owner-operator businesses grow faster on that than they would on a sprint that costs ten times more.

An account manager between you and a problem. Some founders prefer that layer. Most of mine do not, which is why they hired me. But it is worth saying clearly: if you want a buffer, I am not the right answer.

How I price, in plain English

For context against Single Grain’s $10,000 to $49,000 most-common project range (per their Clutch profile, June 2026): a full year of my SEO program is $18,000, which sits inside the lower band of their single-project range, while delivering twelve months of work instead of one engagement. A year of SEO plus a new website is $18,500. A year of SEO plus a new site plus six landing pages is $20,300. Those are not equivalent scopes to a multi-channel Single Grain engagement, and I am not pretending they are. They are equivalent scopes to the senior SEO portion of a mid-market engagement, which is what most owner-operators actually need.

What you can verify about me before the call

I take this seriously because I am asking you to consider a founder-led alternative to a known agency name, and the burden of proof is on me, not on Single Grain.

Upwork track record. 37 five-star reviews, Top Rated Plus status, 97% job success score, 222 completed jobs. All public, all checkable. That is nine years of doing this work for real clients, with the full feedback record visible to anyone before they hire.

Real client work, on real domains. I write under my own name, build under my own brand, and refer to specific clients when permitted. The site you are reading right now is built by me. The methodology pages, including my SEO service and the comparison piece on cheaper SEO agencies than Neil Patel Digital, are written without ghostwriters.

Public reviews. The reviews I am referencing are linked from my reviews page. Read them. They are clients, not employees, and they describe what the work actually felt like, not what a marketing page promised.

A free audit that is not a sales pitch. Thirty minutes, your site and your competitors live on the screen, and a specific list of what is costing you visibility. If the right answer for your stage is Single Grain or another agency, I will say so. That has cost me revenue over 9 years and it is also why the clients I do take stay and refer.

The math of “cheaper” over a real twelve months

Cost comparisons live or die on the time horizon, so here is the twelve-month version with no spin. On Single Grain’s median engagement range, you commit somewhere between $10,000 for a single project and $49,000 for a larger one (per their Clutch profile, June 2026), and the engagement may be project-based or retainer (per their site, June 2026). On mine, you commit $1,500 a month, every month, with the freedom to leave any month, which over a full year totals $18,000 if you stay the entire time.

That gap is real, and it is also less dramatic than the minimums make it look once you compare apples to apples. The honest framing is this: their $10k+ minimums buy multi-channel scale and team depth that my $1,500 a month cannot match. My $1,500 a month buys senior SEO work continuously for a year that their minimums do not, on their own scope mix, allocate purely to SEO either. Different shapes of value, both legitimate, and the right one depends on what you actually need.

Where the math really lands in my favor is the floor case: a single-location service business or an early-stage ecommerce brand that simply does not have $10,000 a month available for marketing. For that buyer, the question is not “Single Grain vs. me at equivalent scope.” The question is “Single Grain’s minimum vs. doing nothing.” That is the buyer I built the $1,500 monthly tier for, and that is the buyer most likely to be reading this page.

Who I am NOT for

I turn down inquiries regularly because the wrong fit is bad for both of us. I am not for you if your budget is genuinely above $10,000 a month and you want the multi-channel coordination that buys; hire Single Grain or a peer of theirs. I am not for you if you want a guaranteed ranking, because no honest SEO will give one. I am not for you if you want monthly silence and a 12-month invoice, because I work in monthly conversation. I cap my client load at what I can do senior work for, which sometimes means a short wait, and always means I will not take two competing clients in the same local market and the same niche.

Frequently asked questions: cheaper SEO agency than Single Grain