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B2B SaaS marketing agencies the assistants named, and the retainers their own pages publish

Eight agencies across two engines, two named by both, a five fold price gap on one firm, and every figure checked against the vendor page.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

Two assistants asked for the best marketing agency for a SaaS company named nine firms between them and agreed on two, Kalungi and Directive Consulting. For Kalungi one engine reported full service pricing from 50,000 dollars a month and the other reported retainers from about 10,000, a five fold gap on the same vendor on the same night, and kalungi.com/pricing returns HTTP 404. The figures that survive a check are below, with the ARR band each is sold against, because in this market the retainer is priced by your stage and not by the channel list.

What was asked and what each engine returned

"What is the best marketing agency for a SaaS company", put to the ChatGPT and Gemini product surfaces through a data provider on 21 October 2026 at 22:19 and 22:37 UTC. No vendor was named in the question. Both engines ran a live search. ChatGPT returned 27 citations and recommended Powered by Search, Directive Consulting, Kalungi, TripleDart and SimpleTiger, in that order. Gemini returned 3 citations and recommended Kalungi, SaaS Hero, Bay Leaf Digital, Grow and Convert, and Directive or Refine Labs, organised explicitly by ARR band.

The published retainers, checked on 22 October 2026

AgencyNamed byPrice the engine gaveWhat we read on the vendor page
Powered by SearchChatGPT, first6,000 a month paid media, 9,000 a month SEO and LLM visibilityConfirmed on poweredbysearch.com/pricing, and both are the monthly billing entry tiers. The same page publishes a quarterly billing column at 5,000 and 7,500, and upper tiers at 14,400 and 21,600 a month for paid media and for SEO, plus fractional RevOps from 7,200.
Bay Leaf DigitalGemini, thirdRetainers start at 3,999 to 5,000 a monthConfirmed on bayleafdigital.com/pricing. The 3,999 figure is a six month engagement for authority and AI presence work, baselined across ChatGPT and Claude among others, and the full service tier reads "starts at 5,000 monthly".
SaaS HeroGemini, secondFlat retainers 4,000 to 4,500 a month for ad spend up to 10,000The 4,000 is published on saashero.net, as a Growth Team flat retainer indexed to total monthly ad spend. The same page sets its own best fit at 10M to 50M ARR with 15,000 dollars or more in monthly ad spend, not up to 10,000.
KalungiBoth enginesFrom 50,000 a month, or around 10,000 a monthkalungi.com/pricing returns HTTP 404. kalungi.com renders 1,585 words of case studies, including pipeline figures of 4M and 4.7M dollars, and no retainer price. Neither figure was verifiable there that day.
Directive ConsultingBoth enginesCustom, or 25,000 to 26,000 or more a monthPresented as custom by one engine and as a range by the other. No published figure is quoted here.
Grow and ConvertGemini, fourthAround 4,900 to 5,000 a monthgrowandconvert.com returned 200 and renders 1,017 words with no dollar figure in them.
SimpleTigerChatGPT, fifthNo figure givensimpletiger.com/pricing returned 200 and renders 3,178 words of case results, including a 41 to 1 return and 3 million dollars in revenue attributed to search, and no price.
TripleDartChatGPT, fourthCustom pricingtripledart.com/pricing returns HTTP 404.

One of the cited sources says the quiet part out loud

Gemini's source for its second recommendation is saashero.net/strategy/best-b2b-saas-marketing-agency/. We read it on 22 October 2026. Its own key takeaways state that most agency rankings are biased because 13 of 16 B2B SaaS agency lists in the fourth quarter of 2026 were published by agencies that included themselves. That page is published by SaaS Hero, and it recommends SaaS Hero for mid market B2B SaaS.

Both of those facts are worth holding at once. The 13 of 16 observation is a useful, specific thing for a buyer to know, published with a count and a quarter. And the page carrying it is the fourteenth example. The practical rule that follows is simple: when an assistant hands you a shortlist, open the citations and check who published each one before you weigh the ranking.

Price by stage, which is how this market actually sells

Gemini organised its answer by ARR band and that is the correct axis for SaaS, more than channel or specialism. Using only the figures verified above:

  • Pre seed to about 5M ARR. The published entry points that exist at all are the 3,999 dollar six month authority engagement and flat ad retainers from 4,000 a month. At this stage the fee is a large share of total spend, so a six month commitment is the term to negotiate first.
  • 5M to 20M ARR. The published middle of the market: full service from 5,000 a month, paid media from 6,000 at monthly billing or 5,000 quarterly, SEO and answer engine work from 9,000 monthly or 7,500 quarterly.
  • 20M ARR and above. Published upper tiers at 14,400 and 21,600 a month per discipline, with multi channel teams and board level reporting attached. Everything above that in these two answers is a range the engines supplied rather than a rate a vendor published.

Two things follow for a founder. The quarterly billing discount on the one vendor that publishes both is 20 per cent of a five figure monthly fee, which is the single largest negotiable item in the set and appeared in neither engine answer. And the gap between the lowest and highest published entry price, 3,999 against 21,600, is not a quality gradient. It is a difference in scope, in the number of channels owned, and in who is reporting to whom.

For what each engagement type actually includes and how to judge the proposal, see SaaS marketing consultancy and the four engagements.

Agency recommendation share is the metric none of them reported

The spec behind this page asked for one number: the share of a fixed, disclosed set of non branded SaaS buyer prompts on which each agency is recommended, with sample size, test date and engine breakdown. We can report that for the prompt above and we will not pretend to more. One prompt, two engines, 21 October 2026: nine agencies named, two of them named by both engines, seven by one engine only. Powered by Search was first on one list and absent from the other. A reputation built on one engine's lists does not carry across to the other, and a vendor buying a top spot on a single comparison page is buying one engine's answer.

The same arithmetic is what a SaaS company should be running on its own category rather than on agencies. Our dated study of which SaaS companies Gemini recommends is the repeatable version, and it is built to be rerun rather than quoted once.

Where we sit, and where a rival is stronger

AI Knows Us is not a SaaS marketing agency. We run no paid media, write no demand generation programmes and own no funnel, so nothing here is a bid against the firms on this page. One of them, Bay Leaf Digital, prices authority and AI presence work at 3,999 dollars a month on a six month engagement, which tells you the category is now a line item inside SaaS agency retainers. What we sell is narrower and it is the grading: we ask the non branded buyer questions, on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and report which products get named and which sources produced the answer. The party doing the work is the wrong party to grade it.

Our published rates, from aiknowsus.com/llms.txt read 22 October 2026: SEO Start 149 dollars a month in the US watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, Growth 299 watches 100 questions on all five engines weekly, Scale 599 watches 300, Everything 1,799 watches 300 with 4,800 credits. Growth is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, and a Claude check costs 3 credits where most checks cost 1. Where a rival is stronger, by name: tryprofound.com/pricing, read 22 October 2026, publishes SSO and SAML with SOC 2 compliance, unlimited seats, CSV and JSON exports, an API and up to nine answer engines on its enterprise tier. Our own pricing page, 119,203 bytes read the same day, renders no SSO, no SAML, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and any SaaS company that runs a vendor security review will reach that gap before it reaches our numbers.

What the reading above establishes. One prompt per engine on one night, which fixes what each engine said then. It grades published disclosure and engine agreement, not the quality of anybody's growth work. A 404 on 22 October 2026 is a record of what that server returned on that date.

What SaaS founders ask about agency pricing and AI shortlists

Why did two engines give Kalungi prices five times apart

One reported a figure from a third party comparison and the other reported a market estimate. kalungi.com/pricing returned HTTP 404 on 22 October 2026 and the home page publishes case results rather than rates, so the only reliable number is the one on a proposal addressed to you.

What is a normal B2B SaaS agency retainer in 2026

From pages we verified on 22 October 2026: 3,999 a month for a six month authority and AI presence engagement, 4,000 a month for a flat paid retainer indexed to ad spend, 5,000 a month for full service, 6,000 for paid media and 9,000 for SEO and answer engine work at monthly billing, with published upper tiers at 14,400 and 21,600 a month.

Should I pick the agency an assistant lists first

Use it as a candidate, not a verdict. The engines agreed on two names out of nine and put different firms first, and one of the two citation sources is a ranking published by the agency it ranks. Open the citations, then compare three proposals on one scope.

Does the agency choice depend on ARR

Yes, and the vendors say so themselves. One publishes its best fit as 10M to 50M ARR with at least 15,000 dollars of monthly ad spend. Below roughly 5M ARR the fee is a large share of total spend, so scope narrowly and buy one channel properly rather than a full funnel badly.

How do I measure whether buyers hear about us from an assistant

Fix a set of non branded buyer questions, the ones a prospect asks before they know your name, and ask them on each engine on a schedule. Record which products are named, in what order, and which sources the answer cites. The sources are the actionable half: they tell you which comparison pages and directories are deciding your category's shortlist.

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