Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the SEO work personally. No junior handoff, no account manager between you and me.

Who Tinuiti is, per their own site

Before I tell you why I am cheaper, let me tell you fairly what Tinuiti is. Per tinuiti.com in June 2026, Tinuiti positions itself as the largest independent full-funnel performance marketing agency across the media that matters most: paid search, paid social, Amazon and retail media, programmatic, streaming and connected TV, affiliate, email, and SEO. Their About page describes roughly $4 billion in digital media under management and a headcount above 1,200 employees. In June 2025, per their newsroom, they announced an expanded AI SEO and Generative Engine Optimization offering aimed at visibility across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and similar surfaces.

That is a real agency doing real work for real enterprise clients. I am not writing this page to dunk on them, and you should not pick a vendor based on a competitor page that reads like an attack ad. The honest framing is simpler: Tinuiti is built around enterprise multi-channel media at scale. I am built around founder-led SEO for SMBs at a published flat price. Those are two different products, and the right one depends entirely on what shape your business actually is.

What Tinuiti costs, per third-party sources

Tinuiti does not publish pricing on its site in June 2026, which is standard for enterprise agencies and not a knock against them. What that means in practice is that any number I quote here has to come from third parties: independent agency-comparison writeups, Clutch and similar review platforms, and industry pricing benchmark posts published in 2026.

Per multiple third-party 2026 agency-comparison reports, the consistent picture looks like this (est.): minimum monthly engagements in the roughly $10,000 to $25,000 range, often with a percentage-of-media-spend layer on top for paid channels typically described in the 10 to 15 percent range, and a target client that spends well into six figures per month on media. Contract terms in those same writeups are typically described as multi-month, often six to twelve months, with the usual early-exit terms (est.).

Every one of those numbers is an external estimate, and I want to be clear: I have not seen a Tinuiti contract, and Tinuiti has not confirmed any of these to me. Get a real quote from them if they are on your shortlist. What I can say with confidence is that, per their site and their public positioning, Tinuiti is not chasing the SMB whose total SEO budget is $1,500 to $5,000 a month, and you should not be insulted that the discovery call ended where it did.

What I cost, on the record

I publish my prices because almost nobody at the agency end of this market does, and the opacity costs SMBs weeks of discovery calls before they learn whether they are even in budget.

SEO is $1,500 a month flat. No contract, no setup fee, no per-channel upcharge, no percentage-of-media-spend, no junior account manager between you and the work. If you cancel, everything I built, the pages, the schema, the profile improvements, the content, stays with your business and is yours from day one. The full breakdown lives on my pricing page.

The honest cost gap, side by side

Two columns, same row labels, only the verifiable claims. Every Tinuiti row is “per their site” or “per third-party 2026 reports (est.)” because Tinuiti does not publish numbers. Every Sprout Sage row is mine, on the record.

Read that table honestly. If your business is at the scale where the Tinuiti row looks right, you should hire them or one of their peers. If your business is at the scale where the Sprout Sage row looks right, the conversation we should have is on a free 30-minute call, not in a six-week procurement process.

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

This is the section most competitor-comparison pages skip because they are pretending the answer is always “pick us.” It is not. Tinuiti is built around problems I cannot solve, and there are real situations where booking a call with them and skipping me is the right move.

Enterprise media spend across multiple channels. If you are spending high six figures or seven figures a month across Google, Meta, Amazon, programmatic, and CTV, and you need one agency holding the whole picture, that is an integrated team’s job. One senior person cannot, and should not, run that. Per their site, Tinuiti is built for exactly that workload.

Amazon and retail media as a primary channel. If most of your revenue runs through Amazon and you need deep retail-media operators with Vendor Central and Seller Central depth, plus DSP work, plus on-Amazon SEO and creative, that is an enterprise specialty. Per their site Tinuiti has a substantial retail-media practice. I do not.

In-house procurement that requires scale. Larger enterprises often cannot legally vendor a sole proprietor: minimum employee counts, insurance floors, security questionnaires, SOC 2, MSA frameworks, and so on. A 1,200-person agency clears those gates as a matter of course. I run lean, and that is not the right shape for a Fortune 1000 procurement team.

You need an account team, not an operator. Some buyers want weekly status calls with a dedicated account manager, a strategist, a media director, and channel leads. That is a legitimate preference and a legitimate org chart. It is also not what you get from a founder-led shop. If that team structure is what you need, hire it.

If any of those four are clearly you, close this tab, get Tinuiti on a discovery call, and good luck. Genuinely. I would rather you find the right fit than book a call with me out of price-shopping and waste both our time.

When I am the right call instead

Now the other side. There is a much larger group of businesses for whom the enterprise agency lane was never realistic, and where the choice was never “Tinuiti versus me” but “Tinuiti’s discovery call rejection versus actually getting SEO done.” That group looks like this.

Local trades and home-services. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC, roofers, landscapers, locksmiths. Your win is Map Pack, reviews, service and city pages, and freeze-season timing if you are seasonal. Enterprise agencies are not built around this work, and you would be paying for capabilities you will never use. I have spent 9 years building exactly this engine for trades shops.

Single-location and small-chain medspas. Aesthetic and wellness clinics with one to a handful of locations. The win is a clean Google Business Profile, real before-and-after content within FTC and medical-advertising rules, treatment pages that actually answer questions, and review velocity. I do this work without medical claims and without the kind of compliance-blind copy that gets clinics in trouble.

Indie Shopify and DTC stores. If your store does five to seven figures a year and you are not yet running multi-million-dollar media programs, you need on-page SEO, category and collection content, schema, and AI search visibility, not an enterprise omnichannel program. The $1,500 flat retainer is built for this.

B2B SaaS pre-Series B. Early-stage SaaS founders need topical authority, comparison pages, alternative pages, integration pages, and a content engine that supports sales, not a six-figure media operation. Founder-led is faster here.

Professional services and small B2B. Law firms, accounting practices, consultants, agencies needing white-label senior SEO support. The work is on-page, content, citations, reviews, and authority building. It is not enterprise-scale, and it should not be priced like it.

Anyone whose total monthly SEO budget is under roughly $10,000 (est.). If that is you, by definition you cannot retain Tinuiti without compromising on scope, and an enterprise agency engaged below its natural minimum tends to be a bad experience for everyone. A senior operator at a flat $1,500 is a more honest fit.

Curious where you fall before we ever talk? My free 30-minute audit is exactly that conversation. I review your site and Google Business Profile live, I tell you what is costing you traffic and leads, and if the answer is “you are too big for me and should call Tinuiti,” that is what I will say.

What you are actually giving up at $1,500 a month flat

Honesty section. There are real trade-offs in hiring one senior person at SMB pricing instead of an enterprise agency, and I would rather list them here than have you discover them in month three.

You give up an account team. No dedicated CSM, no media director, no creative team, no analytics group. You get me. That is faster for execution and lighter on coordination overhead, but it is one person’s bandwidth, which is real and finite.

You give up multi-channel breadth. I do SEO, content, on-page, technical, local, AI search visibility, and the website and landing page work that supports them. I do not run nine-figure Google Ads accounts, I do not operate Amazon DSP, I do not buy CTV inventory. If those are core to your plan, I am not the partner.

You give up the procurement comfort of a 1,200-person vendor. Some enterprises genuinely cannot buy from a sole proprietor. That is fine, and it is a real reason to go elsewhere, not a slight against the work.

You give up the brand-name logo wall. If your CMO needs to walk into a board meeting and say “we hired Tinuiti,” I cannot give you that, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. My credentials are public, verifiable, and earned in the open: 37 five-star reviews on Upwork, Top Rated Plus, 97% job success, 222 completed jobs, 9 years. That is the trade.

What you get back: a published flat price, no contract, the actual senior who does the work on every call, and the freedom to leave the moment the program stops earning its keep. For most SMBs, that trade is the right one. For some businesses it is the wrong one, and I will say so on the audit call.

The AI search question

Worth addressing directly because it is the headline that enterprise agencies, including Tinuiti per their June 2025 announcement, have pivoted toward over the past year. Generative Engine Optimization, AI SEO, LLM visibility, however it is branded, the work is roughly the same family: making sure Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Claude can find, parse, and cite your content cleanly.

I do this work as part of the same $1,500 a month flat program, not as a separately priced “AI SEO” tier. Schema markup that actually validates. Clean entity definitions on About and Service pages. FAQ structures that LLMs lift verbatim. Content built around the questions a buyer types into an AI assistant, not just a keyword tool. Citations and authority signals that make my clients sound like the source instead of the also-ran.

There is no honest reason this work should cost a five-figure-a-month premium for an SMB. The underlying playbook is mostly disciplined on-page SEO with the AI surfaces in mind. It is the same work I have been doing for 9 years, sharpened for where the search interface is going. Brand-name AI SEO premiums charged by large agencies are real, and per third-party 2026 reports they are layered on top of already-high enterprise retainers (est.). I just include it.

What the audit actually is

The reason this page exists is to get the right SMBs into a real conversation. The free 30-minute audit is that conversation, and it is not a sales pitch in a trench coat.

On the call I pull up your website and your Google Business Profile live. I run through the technical fundamentals: indexability, core web vitals, schema, the on-page elements you are leaving on the table. I run a Map Pack grid scan if you are local. I look at how your pages are positioned for AI search surfaces, what content is missing, what content is dragging the rest down. I tell you what is genuinely costing you traffic and leads, and what the realistic time and money cost to fix it is.

And then, honestly, I tell you which lane fits. If you are a small medspa, a local plumber, a Shopify founder, a pre-Series B SaaS, or a small B2B services firm, the lane is probably mine, and I will tell you what I would do and what it would cost. If you are an enterprise brand that wandered in here while comparison shopping, the lane is probably Tinuiti’s or a peer agency’s, and I will tell you that too. The audit costs nothing either way, there is no contract waiting at the end, and you leave the call with a real diagnostic regardless.

Who I am, in numbers you can verify

I will not match Tinuiti on logo wall, and I do not pretend to. What I will match, and beat, is verifiability. Every number below is on my Upwork profile, my reviews page, or this site, and you can cross-check it in five minutes.

9 years doing SEO and digital work as a founder. 37 five-star Upwork reviews, every one written by a real client who hired me and paid me. Top Rated Plus status, which is Upwork’s top tier and is awarded based on sustained performance, not paid placement. 97% job success score, across 222 completed jobs. The reviews page lives here, with the public links. That is the case for hiring me, and it is the case I am willing to put on a money page next to an enterprise agency four orders of magnitude larger than I am. If you want a similar comparison against a different big-name shop, I wrote one for Neil Patel Digital with the same honesty rules.

Who I am NOT for

The mirror image of the “when Tinuiti is the right call” section, on my side. I turn down work, and I would rather tell you here.

I am not for enterprises that need 1,200 people behind the work. I am not for brands whose primary channel is Amazon retail media at scale. I am not for accounts that need full-funnel paid media management across CTV, programmatic, and affiliate. I am not for buyers who need an account team and a quarterly business review cadence with five named contacts. I am not for any client who wants a guaranteed ranking, because anyone offering that is lying to you, and I will not. I am not for direct competitors of an existing client in the same local service area. And I am not for any prospect whose real problem is that the phone is not being answered, because no amount of SEO fixes a voicemail box, and the audit will say so.

Saying no 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 Tinuiti