The short version
- A solo site should spend $0. A small business under $150/mo. An in-house team $150–$400/mo. An agency $300–$800/mo depending on seats.
- Seats, not plans, are what break SEO tool budgets. Extra users run $16–$80/mo each depending on vendor.
- Tools should be a small fraction of your SEO spend. If they are the majority, you are not doing SEO — you are subscribing to it.
- One suite plus one crawler is the right shape for almost everyone. Two suites is almost always waste.
SEO tool pricing is opaque by design. Plans are compared on features rather than limits, seats are an add-on disclosed late, and the annual discount is presented as the default price. The result is that teams budget for the sticker and pay considerably more.
What follows is a set of concrete budgets by business size, built from prices read off the vendors’ own pages.
Budget by size
All prices from the vendor pricing tables elsewhere on this blog, read on the date shown in the sources.
The seat maths
Every major suite includes exactly one user and charges for the rest. This is the line item that turns a comfortable budget into an uncomfortable one, and it is disclosed late enough that most teams discover it after choosing.
Calculated from published seat pricing. Vendors quote seats "from", so a real quote may be higher. Moz seat pricing is third-party sourced because moz.com blocks automated retrieval.
The gap between the cheapest and most expensive five-person configuration above is over $5,000 a year for broadly comparable core capability. That is a hire’s worth of margin on a small agency, decided entirely by a pricing line nobody reads during the trial.
The rule that keeps spend sane
Tools should be a small fraction of your total SEO spend, because the work is labour. A business paying $400/mo for software and nothing for anyone to use it has inverted the ratio. If your tool bill exceeds what you spend on producing content and shipping changes, the budget is upside down.
- Start free. Prove that someone is acting on the data before adding a cost.
- Buy one suite when questions become comparative. Not two.
- Buy the crawler separately — suite audits do not replace it for technical work.
- Count seats before comparing plans. It changes the ranking more often than features do.
- Pay monthly for the first quarter. Annual billing on an abandoned tool is the most expensive optimism in marketing.
Two pricing mechanics are worth watching for at purchase. Several vendors anchor against a "regular" price roughly double what anyone pays, which makes a permanent discount look like an offer — ignore the crossed-out number and judge the selling price alone. And annual billing is a genuine saving only if you still want the tool in month eleven, which first-time buyers of SEO software frequently do not. Pay monthly for a quarter, then commit.
Where our own pricing sits
We charge $5/month, which is deliberately below every tool on this page — because we do far less than any of them. No keyword data, no link index, no rank tracking. It is a different line item, not a cheaper version of the same one, and the underlying method costs nothing if you drive it yourself.