Why we priced our Starter package at $779 (and why the other tiers end in 9 too)

The published industry benchmarks for contractor and home services marketing retainers in 2026 land in a pretty tight range. Single-location service businesses (plumbers, HVAC, garage door, roofing, and similar trades) typically pay between $1,500 and $2,500 per month for a local SEO focused engagement. Multi-location or higher-competition markets push that into the $2,500 to $3,500 range. Full-service engagements including paid ads can easily reach $5,000 to $10,000 per month once you stack Google Ads management, Meta Ads, content production, and reporting on top of the SEO work.

Most agencies will not take a contractor client for less than $1,500 a month because the math stops working at that level. At $1,500 a month, the agency has to pay a senior account manager, a junior analyst, a content writer, a developer, and a share of overhead, all out of the same retainer. By the time you split 1,500 dollars across that many roles, nobody is getting enough time on the account to actually do good work. The client either gets ignored or gets junior-only attention from someone who has never seen a contractor invoice in their life.

This is the structural reason the contractor marketing industry has a floor around $1,500. Below the floor, the economics break for a conventional agency structure. Above the floor, the economics work but only if the agency is running at reasonable scale. Most contractor marketing agencies are therefore priced in the $1,500 to $3,500 band because that is where their cost structure says they have to be.

When Dr. Kebar and I were designing the Reimagine tier structure, we looked at the same industry benchmarks and had a long conversation about where the Starter package should land. The conventional wisdom would have been to put it at $1,499, right at the bottom of the industry range, and be done with it. We did not do that, and the reason goes back to Rocket.

In year one of Rocket Garage Door Services, our cash flow was tight. We were in Google restricted-vertical purgatory, we could not run Google Ads, we were carrying the business on door hangers, organic SEO, and referral partnerships, and every dollar of marketing spend had to justify itself against a payroll that was already stretched. There were months when I looked at agency proposals for $1,500 to $2,500 a month and thought 'I cannot afford that, and if I cannot afford that, then who can?' The honest answer was that plenty of contractors in year one cannot afford it.

When we started thinking about Reimagine's pricing, the Rocket experience became the anchor. I asked myself what the minimum viable package would be at a price that the Rocket of year one could have actually paid without cutting a crew or delaying a truck repair. I worked backward from that constraint. The number that came out was in the high $700s. It was not $500 because $500 would have been too cheap to deliver anything real. It was not $1,000 because $1,000 would have been a psychological barrier for the exact contractors who needed the service most. It was around $800, adjusted down a bit for the charm pricing effect I will explain in the next section.

The result is that Starter is priced below the industry floor specifically so that the contractors who need it most can actually afford to hire us. We are not undercutting the market because we are desperate for business. We are undercutting the market because we know exactly what it feels like to be a contractor in year one who reads an agency proposal and closes the email without replying.

Most pricing pages for services in the $500 to $10,000 range end in 9 or 99 because decades of split testing have shown that consumers process prices from left to right and anchor on the left-most digit. A price of $779 reads to the brain as 'seven hundred something' before the brain finishes the number. A price of $800 reads as 'eight hundred' with no ambiguity. Even when the difference is 21 dollars, the psychological difference is larger because the left-digit effect does not care about the actual math, it cares about the first number it sees.

Published studies on charm pricing have shown conversion lifts ranging from a conservative 24 percent to a suspiciously high 152 percent in specific categories. Our internal experience when we were pricing Reimagine was less dramatic than 152 percent but meaningfully positive on 9-ending prices versus round numbers in early tests. We could have written our own study and called it a 35 percent lift, but the honest answer is that the lift is real and measurable and we used it.

I could have just rounded the prices to $799 or $800 or $1,000 and pretended the prices were calculated on some rigorous cost accounting methodology. I did not, and the reason is that I would rather tell you the real reason than invent a fake one. The reason Starter is $779 and not $800 is that $779 converts better at the exact point in the discovery call where a contractor is deciding whether to continue the conversation. The reason Scale is $6,779 and not $6,800 is the same. We use a tool that works, we are transparent about using it, and we expect our clients to be sophisticated enough to appreciate the transparency rather than punish us for it.

If you think charm pricing is manipulative, I understand the reaction, and we have had contractors on discovery calls tell me directly that they preferred when I gave them the honest explanation above rather than pretending the price was derived from some spreadsheet. Charm pricing works better when you admit it than when you try to hide it. Hiding it reads as manipulative. Admitting it reads as 'at least this person is being straight with me.'

Our four tiers are Starter at $779 per month, Intermediate at $2,383, Growth at $3,479, and Scale at $6,779. Three of the four end in 79 because charm pricing is charm pricing all the way up the ladder. The one that breaks the pattern is Intermediate at $2,383. Here is the story on that one.

We initially priced Intermediate at $2,379 to match the rest of the pattern. After running it for a couple of months, we realized the scope at that tier was meaningfully richer than the tier below and the price needed to reflect that. We raised it to $2,383, which is an unusual number that does not follow the charm pattern but also happens to be the number that matched our internal cost model when we refined the scope. We kept the $2,383 price because it was accurate to what the scope actually delivered, and because changing it again would have looked like we were not sure what we were doing.

The other three tiers follow the charm pattern because they were easier to align with the scope from the beginning. Starter at $779 is the minimum viable engagement anchored to Rocket year-one math. Growth at $3,479 is the sweet spot where most of our current clients sit, aligned to the scope of what a multi-service contractor needs. Scale at $6,779 is the full-service engagement for contractors doing the kind of volume that can justify the extra overhead of Google Ads, Meta Ads, and full content production on top of the SEO foundation.

There is no pricing game in the numbers themselves. What you see is what you pay. We do not run promotional discounts, we do not offer first-month discounts, we do not do setup fees, and we do not hide costs in the contract. The number on the pricing page is the number on the invoice.

The honest answer: Starter is a focused engagement, not a full-service retainer. At $779 a month you are getting the absolute foundation of Local SEO done correctly by senior hands, plus review acquisition and Google Business Profile management. That is it. We are not throwing in Meta Ads or content writing or website redesign at that tier, because the math does not support it.

Specifically, Starter includes Google Business Profile full optimization with weekly posts, NAP cleanup across the 30 to 40 most important citation directories, one new city page per month, review acquisition automation via SMS and email, Google Q&A seeding, monthly rank tracking, and a monthly strategy call with Andre directly. That is the scope that makes sense at $779 in a single-location service business context.

What Starter is NOT is a full-service marketing engagement. You are not getting Google Ads management, you are not getting Meta Ads, you are not getting a website rebuild, you are not getting a content engine producing blog posts every week. Those are available at higher tiers where the economics support the additional work. At Starter we are giving you a Local SEO foundation that can carry a small contractor business through its first year without breaking the bank, and then you can upgrade later if the business is ready for the bigger scope.

This is the honest version of a starter tier that most agencies will not offer because the scope is too narrow to support their internal cost structure. We can offer it because our internal cost structure is different. Andre handles every client personally at every tier, which means there is no junior analyst layer that has to be compensated out of the retainer. Dr. Kebar handles paid channels personally at every tier, same reason. The retainer goes almost entirely to the senior work that produces the result, not to layers of account management.

Every Reimagine contract includes a 30-day cancellation clause. No long-term lock-in. No cancellation fee. No hold-harmless language that traps you in a bad engagement. If the partnership is not working on your end, you give us 30 days notice and the contract ends. Your territory reopens after 30 days to the next qualified contractor in line, and you keep every asset we built during the engagement.

The 30-day cancellation clause is the thing that makes the pricing honest. Every month you pay us, you are re-deciding to work with us. We cannot lock you in with a 12-month contract and then coast on the first few months while the long tail of the commitment pays our payroll. We have to deliver value every single month, because any month that does not deliver value is a month that might trigger a cancellation notice.

The combination of below-market Starter pricing and 30-day cancellation is designed to put the incentive structure of the business entirely on our side of the table. We are not making money because you signed a year-long deal. We are making money because you are getting enough value every month to keep writing the check. If the value stops, you stop. That is how it should be, and it is how most agencies are reluctant to structure their contracts because it is more work for them.

The convention in contractor marketing is to hide pricing behind a 'contact us for a custom quote' page. The reason the convention exists is that it lets the agency price-discriminate based on what they think the client can pay, which usually means quoting higher to contractors with bigger trucks and quoting lower to contractors who seem stressed about money. This is not illegal and it is not universally bad practice, but it is the opposite of how we want to run Reimagine.

We publish pricing because we want the decision to continue the conversation to be based on fit, not on price negotiation. When a contractor visits our pricing page before booking a discovery call, they already know what a reasonable engagement will cost and they can decide whether it is in their range. The discovery call is then focused on whether we are the right partner for them, not on whether they can afford us or whether we can get them to commit to a higher number than they expected.

The downside of publishing pricing is that we lose some negotiating leverage. A contractor who is willing to pay $3,000 but books a $779 Starter call because they saw the price on our page is a contractor we are charging less than they would have paid. That is fine. We would rather have a clean pricing page and honest conversations than extract maximum willingness to pay from every client. The long-term reputation of the agency depends on being the one people trust to quote fairly, and trust is fragile.

Here is the condensed version of everything above, in the form of the principles we actually apply when we think about pricing at Reimagine.

• Anchor the minimum tier to what a year-one contractor can actually afford, not what the industry floor happens to be
• Publish every price openly, never hide pricing behind a contact form
• Use charm pricing where it works and admit it when asked, because the reputation cost of getting caught pretending is higher than the cost of being honest
• Keep the scope of each tier tight so the price reflects what the client is actually getting, not a padded bundle
• Offer 30-day cancellation on every engagement so the incentive stays on delivering monthly value
• Never charge a setup fee, a cancellation fee, or a hidden add-on
• Handle all client work at every tier with senior hands, not junior analysts, which is only possible if the client roster stays deliberately small
• Turn down contractors who cannot afford the right tier for their actual needs, even if they could technically afford a cheaper tier that would not serve them well
• Review pricing annually against the real delivery cost and adjust when the scope or the market shifts, without grandfathering old clients into unsustainable rates or surprise increases
• Publish the reasoning behind pricing decisions (like this post) so prospective clients understand the logic and can judge whether we are the kind of agency they want to work with