Thymesnow against an SEO agency
Software has fully replaced the audit and most of the technical work, has partly replaced content and links, and has not replaced relationships, original research or judgement about your specific business.
The context
A mid-market retainer runs roughly £2,500 to £15,000 a month. A large share of that is work that is now deterministic: crawling, auditing, prioritising, writing titles and meta descriptions, generating schema, planning internal links, cleaning sitemaps, checking crawler access.
The rest is not. A good link builder has people who take their call. Digital PR needs someone to have the idea. Answering a journalist well and within the hour is a human job. Deciding whether a particular link on a particular page is worth the effort is judgement.
So the honest framing is not agency versus software. It is that the deterministic 70% of the hours should cost near nothing, and you should pay a human for the part that is actually hard.
Side by side
| Category | an SEO agency | Thymesnow |
|---|---|---|
| The audit | Weeks, then a PDF | Ten minutes, free, with the fixes already written |
| Technical fixes | A ticket for your developer | Generated and published into your CMS on approval |
| Content | Written by a person, on their schedule | Brief and draft generated, quality gated, a person still edits and approves |
| Links | Relationships and outreach | Prospects found, qualified, verified and drafted. A person still sends |
| Reporting | A monthly deck | A report that reads flat as flat and says so in the first paragraph |
| Cost | £2,500 to £15,000 a month | Free to audit. Published plans below that by an order of magnitude |
| What you keep on cancelling | Whatever is in your CMS | Whatever is in your CMS, which is everything we shipped |
Why people choose this
The deterministic work costs nothing to repeat
A crawl and 90 checks use no model and no data vendor, so running it weekly costs the same as running it once. An agency bills the same audit every quarter because a person does it.
Nothing is done that you cannot see
Every finding carries its evidence, every fix carries the previous value, every publish is logged and reversible. An agency's work is visible in a report they wrote about themselves.
The timeline is stated honestly
Scores move in days. Rankings move in three to six months. Anyone promising otherwise is selling the demo, and a tool that implies otherwise sets up a refund conversation in month two.
When to buy an SEO agency instead
These are real. If one of them describes you, we would rather you bought theirs than churned in month two.
You need links that come from relationships
The highest-authority links available to a small company come from someone answering a reporter well, within the hour. No software produces that decision, and ours does not send a single email on its own.
You need digital PR
Original research, a survey, a data story. The one link tactic with no ceiling, and it needs a person to have the idea and place it.
You need someone accountable
A retainer buys a name you can call when traffic drops. Software does not answer the phone and should not pretend it does.
Nobody on your side will approve anything
This model requires one person to approve work. If that person does not exist, a done-for-you retainer is the honest answer and you should pay for it.
What moving actually involves
Run the audit before you give notice. It is free and it will tell you how much of the retainer was hygiene that is now automatic, which is the number the conversation should be about.
Keep the agency for links and PR if those are working. The technical and on-page half is where the substitution is clean.
Questions
Will this replace my agency?
It replaces the audit, the technical work, the on-page work, the schema, the internal linking, the reporting, and the research half of link building. It does not replace relationships, PR or judgement about your business. If your retainer is mostly the first list, the answer is yes.
How long until I see results?
Scores in the app move within days because they measure the site. Rankings take three to six months because Google takes weeks to recrawl and longer to re-rank. Anyone quoting two to four weeks for organic is quoting a paid media timeline.
The audit is the comparison that matters
Run it on your own site. No account, no card, and you keep everything it produces.