Who this is actually for
There's a specific company shape where consulting beats a retainer, and it's narrower than the people selling consulting will admit.
You have a marketer who can write, or a writer who can be briefed. You have a developer, in-house or on contract, with real capacity in the sprint. Someone owns the CMS and can publish without raising a ticket. What you don't have is anyone who knows which of the forty possible things to do next, or whether last month's work actually did anything.
That's a direction problem, not a capacity problem, and it's badly served by a full retainer. You'd be paying us ₹75,000 a month to duplicate people you already employ.
- Good fit: a Series A SaaS with a content marketer and an engineering team, a D2C brand with an in-house content pod, an agency wanting a second opinion on their own SEO, a founder who is genuinely doing the work and needs a sounding board with skin in it.
- Bad fit: nobody to write, no developer access, a team already at capacity on other work, or an expectation that advice alone moves rankings. In those cases we say so on the first call and point you at the full retainer or nothing at all.
What the eight hours actually cover
Advisory time gets spent on decisions, review and unblocking. It does not get spent on production, and the distinction is the whole point of the plan.
In practice a month looks like two calls of 60 to 90 minutes with asynchronous review work between them. You get a shared document that stays current and a Slack or WhatsApp channel for the questions that don't need a call.
- The roadmap, and the ordering of it. What gets built next quarter and, more usefully, what gets dropped. Most in-house SEO plans fail on sequencing rather than on ideas.
- Keyword and topic decisions. Which clusters are worth your team's time given your authority today, and which are a two-year fight you'll lose. We'll tell you when a keyword is out of reach and why.
- Content and technical review. We read what your team shipped and mark it up. Briefs before writing, drafts after, templates before your developer builds them.
- Diagnosis when something breaks. Rankings drop, indexing stalls, a release goes wrong. This is where the retainer of hours earns its keep — you get an experienced read within a day instead of a fortnight of guessing.
- Hiring and tooling input. The job description, the interview questions, the paid test task, and a straight answer on whether you need Ahrefs, Semrush or neither at your stage.
- Reviewing other vendors. Plenty of clients use these hours to audit the agency they already pay. It's an uncomfortable service to offer and a genuinely useful one.
What we don't do on this plan
Every consulting engagement drifts towards execution, usually with the sentence "could you just...". Here's the line, written down before it gets tested.
| Area | Included in the eight hours | Not included |
|---|---|---|
| Content | Topic selection, briefs, editorial review of drafts, structural feedback, decisions on what to update versus rewrite | Writing anything. No articles, no landing pages, no meta descriptions written for you. |
| Technical | Diagnosis, prioritised issue list, specifications your developer can build from, review of the implementation afterwards | Pull requests, CMS edits, schema deployment, redirect files. We specify; your team ships. |
| Links and PR | Strategy, target list logic, review of what you've earned, verdict on offers you've been sent | Outreach. No emails sent, no relationships worked, no placements secured on your behalf. |
| Measurement | Interpreting your dashboards, telling you what a number means, agreeing the metrics that matter | Building the GA4 property, the tag manager container or the reporting stack. |
| Access | Read access to Search Console, GA4 and your CMS so the advice is grounded in your data, not in generalities | Admin rights. We don't need them on this plan and we don't ask for them. |
₹40,000 a month, and what happens to unused hours
One number, one scope, no annual commitment.
- ₹40,000 a month, ex-GST, for eight hours. Billed monthly in advance, month to month from the start — no first-quarter minimum, because advisory doesn't need one.
- Unused hours don't roll over. They also don't get padded to fill the invoice. A quiet month is a quiet month, and if you have three in a row we'll suggest pausing.
- Overrun is billed at the same effective rate, agreed in advance, never applied as a surprise. Most months land close to eight.
- Thirty days' notice, no exit fee. Every document, brief and roadmap we produce is yours to keep, including if you take it to another agency the following week.
- Compare that with the [SEO retainer](/pricing) at ₹75,000/mo, where we do the work rather than direct it. The gap between the two prices is roughly what execution costs — which is a useful thing to know when you're deciding whether to hire in-house.
Consulting or the full retainer — how to choose, and when to switch
The honest test is capacity, not budget. If the roadmap would ship either way, consulting is cheaper. If it wouldn't, consulting is the more expensive option because it produces nothing.
| Your situation | Consulting at ₹40,000 | Retainer from ₹75,000 |
|---|---|---|
| In-house writer with capacity | Works well — we brief and review, they produce | Duplicates a salary you already pay |
| No writer, or a writer at capacity | Produces a roadmap that stalls | The right call. Production is most of the work |
| Developer with sprint capacity | Works well — we specify, they build | Still useful for pace, not essential |
| No developer access at all | Technical advice can't land | We ship CMS and tag-manager work directly |
| You need links and digital PR | Strategy only. Nothing gets earned | Outreach is done for you |
| You want an outcome guarantee | Not available. We don't control execution | 90-day baseline guarantee applies |
Why there's no guarantee on this plan
Everywhere else on this site we make the same commitment: freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search on day one, and if we haven't beaten it in 90 days we keep working free until we do. We never promise a specific ranking position — nobody controls Google's index.
That guarantee is off the table for consulting, and it should be. It works because we control the work. On an advisory plan we control the advice and nothing else. If your writer ships two articles instead of eight because a funding round ate the quarter, the advice was still right and the outcome still didn't arrive. Charging us for that would be unfair; pretending otherwise to win the deal would be worse.
What we do commit to is narrower and checkable. You get an opinion with reasoning attached, not a hedge. When we're unsure, we say the range and why. And when the honest answer is that SEO isn't your constraint this quarter, you'll hear that on a call you paid for — which is arguably the highest-value ₹40,000 we ever bill.
How the engagement is supposed to end
Most advisory retainers are designed to be permanent. A monthly call, a familiar face, an invoice that renews itself quietly for three years. It's a comfortable business and it's not the one we're running.
There's a point on most engagements — often somewhere between month six and month twelve — where the calls get shorter and you're mostly telling us what you already decided. That's the signal. We'll raise it before you do, and we'll suggest dropping to a quarterly check-in or stopping outright.
The exceptions are real and we're not pretending otherwise. Sites in genuinely competitive markets, teams with regular turnover, and businesses replatforming or expanding into new markets keep needing the direction. But the default assumption is that we're temporary, and if that ends up costing us a client who'd have paid for another eighteen months, that's the design working — the same reason we only take three clients a month.