Elmrank vs AI Writing Tools: $300 Done for You vs DIY
AI SEO writers cost $39 to $99 a month and leave the checking, the site and the fixes to you. For $300 we do all of it. Prices, scope, and when a tool wins.
Elmrank editorial5 min readLast reviewed
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A small business owner on r/smallbusiness asked how to keep up with content without paying an agency $2,000 a month: "The actual writing, editing, and distributing consistently is killing me. Is anyone here fully automating this or using an automated seo and content marketing platform that actually works?" The top reply, with 48 upvotes when we read it, was "let me guess, in minute someone will answer with the company they use." We are a company, so here are the published prices of four tools next to ours, and the cases where the tool is the better buy.
| Option | Price | Includes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elmrank | $500 first month, then $300/month | Technical SEO audit and fixes, site design, hosting, domain, up to 30 articles researched, fact-checked and published, monthly report, email replies within 12 hours. We do the work | Elmrank |
| Byword Starter | $83/month billed yearly ($99 month to month) | 25 AI articles a month, WordPress and Webflow publishing. You do the checking and the site | Byword |
| Frase Starter | $39/month billed yearly ($49 month to month) | 10 articles and 50 audit pages a month, publishing to your CMS or hosting on FraseCMS. You run the tool | Frase |
| Surfer Standard | $99/month billed yearly | Create or optimize 360 documents, track 25 AI prompts weekly, plagiarism checker. You write or edit | Surfer |
| Jasper Pro (general-purpose writer, not an SEO tool) | $59/month per seat billed yearly ($69 month to month) | AI writing for multiple brands and campaigns. You pick the topics, check and publish | Jasper |
Every tool above is cheaper than us per month, and some of them publish for you. If you have the time and the know-how to run one, buy it. The rest of this page is about what the price difference pays for.
What the tool leaves on your desk
A tool turns a keyword into a draft, and the better ones push that draft to your CMS. Everything around the draft is still your job:
- choosing which searches are worth a page, and in what order
- checking every fact, number and name in the draft
- fixing the site under the articles: speed, indexing, schema, structure
- hosting, the domain, updates and the things that break
- reading Search Console every month and deciding what to change
Google's own checklist for content asks "Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?" A tool doesn't answer that for you. Someone has to read what it wrote.
That someone costs money too. Say checking and fixing a 25-article month takes you one hour per article. At the median U.S. writer's wage of $36.98 an hour, those 25 hours are worth about $925 a month, on top of the subscription. Your hour may cost more or less, but it's never free.
One small business owner on Reddit went the do-it-yourself route and summed it up: "I figured it out after spending a lot on Fiverr and having them butcher it every time. Good ol chatgpt helped me." It can work. It just means you're the editor.
What the $300 pays for that a tool doesn't
Go back to the list above. The first month ($500) takes the first and third lines off it: an SEO and GEO audit, a content plan built from the searches worth a page, the technical fixes (speed, indexing, schema, structure) and the site design. If you don't have a site yet, we build it.
From month two, $300 covers the rest of the list, every month. We write and fact-check up to 30 articles and publish them, keep fixing what new pages and updates break, and pay for hosting and the domain. You get a report on what we published, what we fixed and your Search Console clicks, and email replies within 12 hours.
You give us access to your Search Console and domain account and tell us about your product. You don't need to learn the tool, the CMS or what a canonical tag is. There's no contract, and the code, content and domain stay yours if you leave.
Yes, we use AI too
We'd rather say it plainly. AI tools draft our articles. Our pipeline then researches, fact-checks and audits each one, and a person approves it before it goes live. With a tool, that checking is your job; with us, it's ours.
Google's guidance says "Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines." Its spam policy calls it scaled content abuse "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users," and that holds "no matter how it's created." Google's self-check question "Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?" applies to us as well: we do use automation, and our own sites have published 1,844 articles. A sign-off doesn't settle that question. What Google asks is whether each page helps the person who reads it, so this is what we do with every article:
- it answers a search your customers make, picked for your business in the content plan
- each fact in it comes with the source it was taken from, and the pipeline checks the draft against those sources
- a person reads it and approves it before it goes live
- the monthly report puts your Search Console clicks next to what we published, so pages nobody reads show up
None of that is a ranking promise, and we don't make one. On our own three sites the same process has earned 203,298 Google clicks since April, by Search Console's count, and two of the three are below where they were ten weeks ago. Our use cases page shows both.
When an AI writing tool is the better choice
Pick the tool if one of these sounds like you.
You enjoy editing and have the hours
If you can spend a few hours a week reading drafts, checking facts and fixing what's wrong, a $39 to $99 tool plus your time is a fine setup. You'll learn a lot about your own market doing it.
Your site is already in good shape
If someone on your team already handles speed, indexing and hosting, you only need the writing part. A tool covers that more cheaply than we do.
You need volume beyond 30 a month and have editors
Frase's $239-a-month plan (billed yearly) includes 100 articles a month. If you have editors to check that many, a tool scales further than our plan's 30.
Your budget is under $100 a month
Then a tool is what fits, and we'd rather you start there than not start.
If none of those fit, and you want the site, the fixes and the articles handled without learning any of it, that's the job we do for $300 a month.
Everything the $300 covers is listed on our SEO content service page.
How we know this
Written by Elmrank editorial. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Oct 14, 2026.
- Byword, pricing, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Frase, plans and pricing, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Surfer, pricing, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Jasper, plans and pricing, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Google Search Central, guidance about AI-generated content, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Google Search Central, Spam policies (scaled content abuse), accessed Oct 14, 2026
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Writers and Authors, accessed Oct 14, 2026
- r/smallbusiness, Has anyone figured out SEO without paying an agency $2k/mo? (post by u/AccordingWeird4596; replies by u/Smart-Intern-4007, u/Grandmas_Fat_Choad), accessed Oct 14, 2026
- Elmrank, Search Console data for three sites we own (snapshot Oct 13, 2026), accessed Oct 14, 2026
Email us your site.
We reply within 12 hours with what we'd fix first. Then we run it for you, technical SEO and content: $500 for the first month, then $300 a month for up to 30 articles. You don't need any technical knowledge, and you can cancel any time.