Cheapest SEO compared, the three different things cheap SEO can mean and what each one buys

"Cheap SEO" is three different purchases. People get burned when they pay the price of one and expect the outcome of another, so the first job is to say which of the three you are buying.

The three things, and the floor of each

One, a cheap service. Somebody does the work for you on a monthly fee. This is where the real disappointment lives, because the cheap end of a service market is cheap by removing the expensive input, which is senior time. A low monthly fee buys a template, a report and somebody junior. That is not fraud and it is sometimes the right buy, but it will not include diagnosis, and diagnosis is the part that decides whether anything else matters.

Two, a cheap tool. You do the work and pay for data. This is the only one of the three where cheap genuinely scales down well, because the data costs the vendor almost nothing extra to serve you and the cheap tiers are real products rather than thin versions of a real product.

Three, cheap in the sense of free. Google Search Console costs nothing and tells you which queries you already appear for, at what average position, and which pages earn them. Almost nobody who asks about cheap SEO has finished reading it. Finishing it is free and frequently removes the need to buy anything in categories one or two for a quarter.

Published tool prices, with us ranked honestly among them

Here is a stated criterion, applied to everybody including ourselves. Rank by the cheapest plan each vendor publishes on its own page, and say what that plan actually allows. Published, because a price you cannot read before a sales call is not a price you can compare.

Moz publishes three separate products at three prices. Its all in one SEO product is $99, its AI search and visibility product is $45, and its Local SEO product is $16, per moz.com/pricing as verified by our editor on 21 October 2026. We are labelling that as an editor verification rather than our own reading, because our own fetch of moz.com on the same day was refused and returned nothing. A refused fetch proves nothing either way, and the figure is given here with its provenance attached so you can check it yourself in a browser. One practical warning if you do check it, because it caught us out before and the correction is the reason the figures above are stated carefully. On that page a price can render above the product name it belongs to, while the bullets underneath belong to the card above it. Take the figure from the words that follow it, not the ones that precede it.

Our own floor, at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt read 21 October 2026, is SEO Start at $149. And here is the thing that matters more than the number. SEO Start publishes 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines. It is a demand and keyword tier. It does not read answer engines at all. The cheapest plan we publish that reads all five surfaces, which are ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, is Growth at $299, with 100 buyer questions and 1,600 credits.

So on the stated criterion, we are not the cheapest and we are nowhere near it. Moz's Local SEO product at $16 is roughly a ninth of our published floor and its AI search product at $45 is under a third of it. Anybody shopping purely on price should not shortlist us, and we would rather say that here than have a buyer discover it after a call. Where we would argue we lead is narrower and checkable, which is that our $299 plan publishes a flat allowance across all five answer surfaces with the count of buyer questions printed next to the price. What we cannot claim is cheapness.

Two more things about our own page that a careful buyer should know. Our pricing page now renders six currencies, with SEO Start shown at Rs 4,999, $149, GBP 119, EUR 139, AU$229 and CA$209. And our rendered pricing text contains no SSO, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no DPA, which we confirmed on 21 October 2026. If you need those, we do not publish them.

We will not reproduce anybody's price table, including the ones above in full, because a table copied today is wrong in a month and a reader deserves the live page instead.

What cheap cannot buy at any price

Three things, and knowing them in advance is most of the value of this page.

Diagnosis. Working out why a site does not rank takes senior judgment and it is the input the cheap end removes first. A cheap service will do work. It will not tell you whether the work was the right work.

Anything that needs developer access. If the fix is in the template, the rendering or the server, no monthly fee avoids somebody competent touching the code.

Time. This is the one nobody says out loud. A cheap engagement does not take longer because it is cheap. It takes exactly as long as an expensive one, and the quarterly fee just feels smaller while it does.

Where to go from here, by branch

If you landed here wanting the service branch, including what a genuinely small budget does and does not buy, that is answered in full at cheapest and low cost SEO services compared, and what a small budget actually buys. We link to it deliberately. When we measured inbound links across 2,286 stored page bodies on 21 October 2026, no other page on this site links to that one, and 939 of our 2,200 live pages were in the same position, 42.7 percent, an upper bound.

If you wanted the tool branch, the cheap tiers that still answer a real question are compared at cheapest SEO tools that still answer a real question. And if you are not price constrained so much as unsure which tool does which job, start at best SEO tools compared, the shortlist by job.