Read every quote as a headcount, not a price
A retainer is a payroll line wearing a nicer outfit. Somebody's salary, some software, some overhead, some margin. If you can work out how much of your fee turns into a person, you can work out what the month will contain — before you sign anything.
Of every ₹100 you send an Indian agency, roughly ₹25–30 goes on software licences, admin, sales, and the bench time between clients. Another ₹15–20 is margin, which is normal and necessary — an agency with no margin has no ability to fix its own mistakes. That leaves ₹50–60 that reaches the people doing your work, and 55% is a fair working number.
Then you need what those people cost. These are the fully loaded monthly costs — salary plus PF, gratuity, insurance, a laptop, a seat, and the honest fact that nobody bills every working hour.
- Junior SEO executive — ₹40,000–₹50,000 a month, fully loaded. Can execute a checklist. Cannot decide what goes on it.
- Mid-level specialist (technical, content or outreach) — ₹90,000–₹1,20,000. Owns one discipline properly.
- Senior strategist or lead — ₹1,70,000–₹2,20,000. The person who's already seen your problem happen to somebody else.
Six price bands, and the team each one funds
Run the arithmetic across the range Indian quotes actually cluster in and you get this. Everything is ex-GST, because almost every quote you'll see is quoted ex-GST and then lands 18% heavier.
| Monthly fee, ex-GST | Delivery headcount it funds | What genuinely ships in a month | Honest expectation |
|---|---|---|---|
| ₹8,000–₹15,000 | 0.1–0.2 of a junior | A report, a handful of title and meta edits, a batch of directory submissions | A subscription to a PDF. Nothing structural gets touched. |
| ₹15,000–₹25,000 | 0.2–0.3 of a junior | On-page edits across 5–10 pages, one short article, rank tracking | Movement only if the site was already close, and only on low-competition terms. |
| ₹25,000–₹40,000 | About half of one generalist | Technical hygiene, one or two researched articles, Google Business Profile work | A real programme for a local site under 30 pages — if you pick one problem and spend it all there. |
| ₹40,000–₹75,000 | One generalist, plus senior review | Two to four articles, continuous technical fixes, someone actually reading Search Console | A small site's whole programme. Still not enough for serious link work. |
| ₹75,000–₹1,50,000 | Four part-time specialists sharing the account | Content on cadence, technical sprints, funded outreach, monthly analysis | First band where four disciplines run in parallel instead of queueing. Competitive national keyword sets. |
| ₹1,50,000–₹3,00,000+ | A dedicated pod of three to five | Multi-language or multi-market work, migrations, developer coordination | Enterprise. Past ₹2,00,000 coordination starts eating a real share of the increase. |
Why Indian rates sit 60–75% below US and UK rates
This is the question every overseas buyer asks and every Indian founder should understand, because it's the same gap read from two directions.
A US agency quoting $3,000 a month is quoting roughly ₹2.5–₹2.7 lakh, depending on the rate that week. That's not their premium tier — in many US markets it's the entry point. The same scope in India is quoted at ₹75,000. The difference is almost entirely salary and rent, plus the cost of a US sales function that has to be funded by the retainer.
None of that makes the output worse. Google's crawler doesn't know which city rendered the page, and a canonical tag written in Pune behaves exactly like one written in Portland. Indian teams have been doing English-language technical SEO for global clients for two decades.
There are two honest counterweights, though, and cheap agencies exploit both.
- Tools are priced in dollars. Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, a rank tracker and a log analyser cost the same in Coimbatore as in Chicago. On a $4,000 retainer that's a rounding error. On a ₹40,000 one it's a large, visible line — which is exactly why the cheapest Indian retainers quietly run without crawl data or backlink data. A team without either is guessing with confidence.
- The gap narrows at the top. Indian agencies serving US and UK clients compete for the same senior people as everyone else, so their rates converge with international ones. If you're paying international prices, ask where the team physically sits — Indian agency versus international agency covers what actually changes.
GST, TDS, and the two numbers that aren't on the quote
Indian agency pricing has a habit of arriving as one number and invoicing as another. Neither of these is a trick — but nobody mentions them in the pitch.
GST is 18%, and virtually every Indian agency quotes exclusive of it. A ₹75,000 retainer bills at ₹88,500. If your business is GST-registered, that's input credit and therefore a cash-flow cost rather than a real one. If you're below the registration threshold — plenty of clinics, coaching centres and small proprietorships are — it's a genuine 18% on top, and you should be budgeting ₹88,500 from the start.
TDS applies too. Indian companies deduct tax at source on agency invoices, commonly at 2% or 10% depending on how the service gets classified. It doesn't change what you pay in total, but it does change the cheque, and it catches out first-time buyers who assumed the invoice number was the transfer number. Your CA will tell you which section applies to your contract.
If you're an overseas client buying from an Indian agency, export of services can be zero-rated under an LUT. Ask before you assume 18% — it's a large enough sum to be worth one email.
Freelancer, boutique, or a team of four
The same site gets wildly different quotes because it's being quoted by wildly different businesses. Here's what each type genuinely costs in India and where each one wins.
- Freelancer — ₹15,000–₹60,000/mo. No office, no sales team, no bench, so far more of your fee becomes work. Almost always one strong discipline and two weak ones. Wins clearly below ₹40,000. Fails on breadth, and on the fortnight they're unwell or chasing a bigger client.
- Boutique agency, three to ten people — ₹40,000–₹1,25,000/mo. Two or three disciplines covered, the founder still touches the work, and you can get them on a call. The sweet spot for local businesses and small national sites.
- Multi-discipline agency, 25+ people — ₹75,000–₹5,00,000/mo. All four disciplines, real process, and a documented handover when someone leaves. Also the highest risk that the people who won the pitch never appear again.
- An overseas agency's Indian delivery arm — quoted in dollars, delivered from India. Perfectly legitimate. Just know you're paying international rates for the cost base described above, and ask directly where the team sits.
What we charge, and what the number is attached to
So you can hold us against the table above rather than taking it on trust.
SEO runs from ₹75,000/mo, and smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo. Organic Social & Content is ₹30,000, ₹50,000 or ₹70,000 a month. Performance Marketing is ₹40,000, ₹75,000 or ₹1,50,000 a month. Bundled: SEO plus social is ₹99,000/mo, social plus performance is ₹75,000/mo, all three is ₹1,75,000/mo. All ex-GST. Ad spend is billed separately with zero media markup.
The price isn't the interesting part. What it's attached to is. On day one we freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search — written down, agreed, before anyone touches the site. If we haven't beaten that number in 90 days, we keep working free until we do.
We never promise a specific ranking position for a specific keyword. Nobody controls Google's index, and an agency that claims otherwise is quoting you a coin flip with a straight face. We promise movement against your own baseline, which is the only number that pays anybody's salary.
It's also why we take three new clients a month and no more. You can't carry that risk at volume — and every agency that says it can is relying on you not measuring. The current rate card lives on our pricing page.