What a $120K POC actually buys.

Two questions worth answering plainly when a SaaS founder reads the pricing page and immediately checks whether it’s defendable to their CFO. First: where does $120K come from? Second: what specifically lands during the six months?

Where $120K comes from

The price isn’t aspirational. It’s anchored to the real cost of the alternatives.

A senior content strategist + a mid-level technical SEO hire — the minimum competent in-house team for this work — costs about $327,000 fully loaded in Year 1. Add $30,000 of tooling (SEMrush, Ahrefs, AthenaHQ, GA4 360) and you’re at $357,000. They take six months to ramp before they ship compounding output. The engagement gets you to a documented cadence by Month 6 at $120,000 plus the $20,000/month retainer you can opt into after. About even on cost; faster on time-to-impact; cleaner on commercial certainty.

A boutique senior SEO agency at $8,000–$20,000/month with 12-month minimums is between $96,000 and $240,000 Year 1, plus project-fee upsells for the deliverables that aren’t part of standard retainer scope (schema graph deployment, attribution dashboard, citation testing). Net: similar total cost, looser shape, and most agencies don’t ship the GEO half end-to-end yet.

An AI content tool subscription at $200–$1,000/month is the cheapest input but it isn’t a strategy substitute. Tools generate; agencies decide. The category mistake of treating them as alternatives is what we call out specifically on the AI tool comparison page.

What lands by Day 30

The first month is the most measurable. By Day 30 you have:

A locked Golden Anchor sentence with an 8-component matrix. The strategy artifact. Used in the schema graph, the homepage, the FAQ, the About page, anywhere the brand gets described.

A live attribution dashboard with the Month 0 baseline frozen on Day 21. GA4 + Search Console + your CRM + AthenaHQ all wired in, joined at per-page granularity. From Day 21 onward, every monthly review reports against the same baseline.

A schema-graph audit and the build-time guardrails to enforce the layer separation. The build pipeline now rejects any future PR that bleeds anchor language into meta titles or ships unthreaded JSON-LD.

A competitive matrix with verifiable wedges per named competitor. A target query map with current rank, difficulty, target rank, and signals required to claim it.

The first month is the most expensive month of operator time on our side. It’s also the most defendable by your CFO — five discrete artifacts that exist or don’t.

What lands by Day 60

Sitewide threaded @graph. Canonical URL strategy resolved (duplicate-coverage URLs collapsed to single canonicals). Meta titles and descriptions rewritten to match search intent. The cluster-fit audit complete — every existing post categorised against the 8-layer pyramid and assigned refresh, decommission, or orphan status.

This is the second-most-expensive month and it’s where most engagements get visible to skeptical board members. The “is the agency doing anything” question has an unambiguous answer.

What lands Months 2–5

Weekly publishing cadence: 1–2 net-new cluster pages per week, monthly refresh of the top-10 ranking pages, monthly internal-link audit. Monthly LLM citation test against the eight target queries × four answer engines. Monthly delta report 5 business days before each call. Quarterly business review with rolled-up pattern detection.

The cadence is the throughput layer. By Month 4 you start seeing real citation movement; by Month 5 the refresh queue is calibrated to your specific ranking-decay signal.

What lands at Month 6

The verdict report. Board-ready, signed by the operator team, delivered five business days before the renewal call. Citation rate delta, organic traffic delta, ranking position delta, AI Visibility delta, revenue-attributable delta — each calibrated against the Month 0 baseline frozen on Day 21.

If the verdict justifies renewal, you sign the multi-year retainer. If it doesn’t, you walk away with no further commitment. The Month-6 verdict is the entire commercial discipline of the engagement — the thing that makes the price defendable upfront and that prevents the renewal conversation from being a sales narrative.

What we don’t bill for

Things that some agencies upsell that we don’t:

Reporting. The dashboard is a deliverable, not an upsell. Monthly reports + QBR + Month-6 verdict are included.

Strategy revisions. If your business pivots mid-engagement, we re-anchor and update the cluster cadence. About one engagement in five hits a mid-flight pivot of this magnitude; it doesn’t trigger a change order.

Senior operator time. The named operators (Abe, James, the senior content-ops curator) are included in the price. Some agencies reserve senior time for top-tier accounts and bill juniors; we don’t.

Schema graph + build-time guardrails. The infrastructure work that ships into your CMS is part of the engagement. Some agencies bill it as a separate project.

What we will tell you on the discovery call

If the engagement is the wrong fit. Specifically: pre-Series-A SaaS, ICP outside SaaS, marketing-budget below the floor, or a senior operator already on staff who can run this themselves. About one in five discovery calls ends with a referral elsewhere — to a freelancer, an in-house hire, an AI content tool, or a Xenon operating-partner engagement if you’re broader than just GEO.

The pricing page exists to make this conversation honest before the call. The Month-6 verdict exists to make it honest at the end. Everything in between is the work.

For the engagement shape, see pricing. For the multi-year math, see the in-house comparison. To start, book a discovery call or complete the discovery questionnaire for a free positioning teardown.