Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the SEO work personally. No junior handoff, no agency markup.

The honest number comparison, per Stryde’s site, June 2026

Before I argue anything, here is what I could verify from public sources as of June 2026. I will only cite what their own site and their Clutch profile state, and I will mark every external benchmark as an estimate the same way I mark my own.

Per their Clutch profile in June 2026, Stryde lists a $5,000 minimum project size and project costs in the $5,000 to $50,000 range, with an hourly rate of $150 to $199 an hour. Per stryde.com in June 2026, Stryde is a Utah-based ecommerce marketing agency founded in 2013, working primarily with D2C ecommerce brands generating $1M to $15M in annual revenue, and offering SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, email marketing, and SMS marketing as their listed channels. That is the picture I am comparing against, and I am only comparing against what they themselves say.

My own number is on a single line on my pricing page: SEO is $1,500 a month flat, no contract. Websites are from $500. A single landing page is from $300. Same price for an ecommerce shop, a medspa, a plumber, or a SaaS in early traction. Those numbers are published because opacity costs business owners weeks of quote-form back-and-forth before they even learn whether they are in budget.

On any reasonable monthly comparison, I am a fraction of a Stryde-tier engagement. That is the headline. The rest of this page is the part the headline cannot do for you: what that gap actually means, what you give up at my price point, and the specific cases where I would tell you to go hire Stryde instead.

What “cheaper than Stryde” actually means, line by line

The phrase “cheaper SEO agency than Stryde” is doing a lot of work in a search query, so let me break down what it actually compares, because the gap is bigger than the monthly retainer alone.

The floor is different. Per their Clutch profile in June 2026, Stryde’s minimum project size is $5,000. Mine is $300, which is a single landing page, and the SEO program starts at $1,500 a month. That means the cheapest serious engagement with me is a fraction of the cheapest engagement with Stryde, and the gap is not 20% or 50%, it is multiples. A small business owner comparing the two is not weighing two similar options at slightly different price points; they are weighing two genuinely different business models.

The commitment is different. I do not require a contract. Per Stryde’s site in June 2026 I could not find a published contract term either way, which is a question worth asking any agency in their tier before you sign. Month-to-month at $1,500 is a very different financial commitment than a multi-month engagement at $5,000-plus a month, and the cancellation calculus changes everything about who can afford to start.

The point of contact is different. With me, the person doing your SEO is the person you email, the person you call, and the person on the monthly review. Per stryde.com in June 2026, Stryde describes a team model with a stated promise that clients have direct access to the people working on their account, which is meaningful at their scale but is a structurally different arrangement than working directly with the founder. Both are legitimate; they are just not the same product.

The scope is different. Per stryde.com in June 2026, Stryde lists SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, email, and SMS as their channels. I list SEO, content, websites, and landing pages. If you need the four other channels run by the same team, the price difference is also a feature difference, and I will not pretend otherwise.

Where the price difference actually comes from

Cheaper is not automatically better, and I will not pretend it is. Here is the structural reason the gap exists, because price gaps that big never come from one side being charitable.

I am the agency. One senior person, founder-led, remote, 9 years in. There is no Utah office to pay rent on, no sales team writing proposals, no junior strategists in between, no account managers translating between client and execution. Per stryde.com in June 2026, Stryde describes a team-based ecommerce growth framework spanning SEO, paid search, paid social, email, and SMS. That is a real team doing real work, and a real team carries real overhead. The price difference is mostly the overhead difference, not the talent difference, and an honest comparison has to say that out loud.

My scope is narrower by design. Stryde is built to run multi-channel ecommerce growth as one stack. I am built to do SEO, content, and the websites and landing pages that support them, very well, for one client at a time. If you need somebody to run paid social, your Klaviyo flows, and your SMS program at the same time as your SEO, I am not that team. Hiring me and then hiring three more specialists is often the right answer for an early-growth business; hiring one $5k-floor agency to do it all is often the right answer for a brand past a certain revenue line. Per Stryde’s stated client base in June 2026, $1M to $15M D2C ecommerce is where that all-in-one model genuinely earns its premium.

I publish my prices on purpose. Per Stryde’s own pages in June 2026, I could not find a flat published monthly SEO retainer; quotes appear to be scoped per engagement, which is normal for an agency at that tier and is not a criticism. It is, however, a real difference for the owner doing the comparison: I tell you the number on the homepage, and you decide before we ever talk whether the math could work. That transparency is itself a feature of the cheaper model, because at my price the discovery process has to be efficient or the unit economics break.

If you want to see the exact scope of what I do at $1,500 a month, the breakdown is on my SEO services page. If you want the proof side first, the reviews page collects every five-star Upwork review with the original context.

When Stryde is the right call (and I will tell you to hire them)

I turn down a meaningful share of inquiries every quarter, and a meaningful share of those go to agencies in Stryde’s tier. If any of the following describe your situation, hire them, not me. I would rather lose a discovery call honestly than win a client I cannot serve well.

You are an established D2C ecommerce brand at $1M to $15M. That is the exact slice Stryde says they serve, per stryde.com in June 2026. A brand at that revenue level usually needs SEO running concurrently with paid search, paid social, email, and SMS, with consistent attribution across all of them. That is one of the legitimate reasons a multi-channel ecommerce agency exists, and trying to stitch that together from a single freelancer and three contractors is a real coordination tax.

You want one team running multiple channels. If your operating model needs SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, email, and SMS coming out of one team with one weekly status call, hire the team that is built for it. Per their site, that is what Stryde lists. That coordination has actual value and it costs what it costs.

You have the budget and you want US-based account management. A $5,000-plus monthly engagement with a Utah-based ecommerce specialist team is a legitimate buy if your business can support it and your operating culture needs same-timezone account management. There are owners for whom remote and founder-led is the wrong fit. I will not try to talk you out of that preference.

Your competition is brand-name ecommerce and you need creative firepower. If you are competing in fashion, baby, home decor, or sporting goods at scale against funded brands, the breadth of a multi-channel agency is doing real work that a single SEO specialist cannot replicate. Per stryde.com in June 2026, those are the verticals they explicitly highlight as their team’s focus.

If none of those fit, keep reading. If any of them fit, save yourself a discovery call and go talk to them directly.

What I would actually do in your first 90 days

One of the most expensive parts of hiring an agency at any tier is the slow start. Discovery calls, scoping documents, kickoff workshops, strategy decks, and three weeks before anything is in your Search Console. At $1,500 a month flat I cannot afford that arc, and neither can you. Here is the order I work in for a new client.

Week one is the technical foundation. Crawl errors, indexation, site speed, Core Web Vitals, canonicalization, schema gaps, broken internal links, mobile rendering issues, and the obvious on-page problems on your money pages. Same kind of audit Stryde describes on their site for ecommerce, per stryde.com in June 2026, just delivered by one person on a tighter timeline because there is no internal hand-off. Most sites have meaningful issues here that nobody has cleaned up in years; those are the cheapest wins available.

Weeks two through four are intent and on-page. I map your existing pages against the searches that actually matter for your business, find the mismatch (pages targeting the wrong query, queries with no page, pages cannibalizing each other), and start the rewrite queue. This is where the bulk of near-term traffic improvement comes from for most established sites; you usually do not need new pages first, you need the existing ones to actually answer what people are searching.

Months two and three are new pages and content. Service pages, category pages, location pages, comparison pages, all built around real demand, all written to a level I would put my name on, all schema-marked. This is the compounding part of the program, and it is also the part that takes 60 to 120 days to show up in rankings (est.). I sequence it after the foundation work because publishing new pages onto a broken technical base wastes effort that could otherwise compound.

Months three onward is iteration. Search Console review, conversion review, page-level diagnosis of what is moving and what is stuck, content updates on the winners, structural fixes on the laggards. There is no separate strategy phase, because the strategy is the iteration; pretending otherwise is how agencies bill for slide decks instead of rankings.

Who I actually am, and what cheaper looks like in practice

My name is Mandeep Singh. I run Sprout Sage Solutions from my home office, I have been doing SEO and content as my full-time work for 9 years, and the public record is the same record you can pull up yourself: 37 five-star Upwork reviews, Top Rated Plus status, 97% job success across 222 completed jobs. That is not a brand story or a slide deck; that is the literal scoreboard, with the original client comments still on the public profile.

At $1,500 a month flat, what you actually buy is the technical foundation, the keyword and intent work, the on-page optimization of what you already have, new pages where they are missing, schema, internal linking, content briefs and execution, the Google Search Console and Analytics review, monthly reporting, and a monthly call with me, not an account manager. Same scope I would charge multiples for if I were running it through an agency P&L. The price reflects who is paying for the office, which is nobody.

What you do not get from me is a four-channel performance team, a logo wall, an account manager, or a 12-month strategic deck. I do not pretend to be those things, because pretending costs the client at the exact moment they need honesty. If you want to see exactly how I stack up against the bigger names in this lane, I wrote the same kind of honest comparison for Neil Patel Digital on my cheaper SEO agency than Neil Patel Digital page.

What it costs, on one screen

I publish prices because the comparison shopping is the comparison. The full breakdown is on my pricing page; the short version lives below.

Worth saying plainly: per Stryde’s Clutch profile in June 2026, their minimum project size is $5,000 and their hourly rate is $150 to $199. My entire month is below that minimum, and the work it covers is real senior work, not a stripped audit and a templated checklist. The way to verify that is the audit call, not the marketing copy on this page.

Honest benchmarks, no guarantees

Nobody can promise a timeline, and anyone who does is selling you a fantasy. After 9 years I can tell you the ranges I typically see, and per stryde.com in June 2026 their stated SEO window of 3 to 6 months for meaningful movement is consistent with mine. All estimates, all dependent on your starting point.

The honest caveat: every range above bends both ways. Your starting point, your domain history, your competitors, and your conversion capacity all change the math. The audit call is where we figure out which end of the range your specific business sits on, and the audit is free either way.

Who I am NOT for

I turn down work I cannot do well. If your business is doing $20M-plus in ecommerce revenue and needs SEO, paid search, paid social, email, and SMS run by one team, I am the wrong answer. Hire Stryde or somebody in their tier, and the higher price is earning its keep. If you want a guaranteed ranking, I will not give one, and anyone who will is lying to you. If you are looking for cheapest at any cost and you want a $99-a-week templated page program, that is also not what I do; my $1,500 flat is the bottom of senior-led work, not the bottom of the market.

And I cap my client load at what I can do senior-level work for, which sometimes means a short wait. It also means I will not take two direct competitors in the same niche and same geography, because I cannot serve both honestly.

Frequently asked questions