How Much Does Personal Reputation Management Cost?

The three price worlds

World one is the executive market: concierge firms and PR agencies. Their published positioning tells the story — managed, done-for-you reputation work aimed at executives and brands, at prices that assume a company is paying. For an ordinary professional with a thin search presence, that's a limousine for a grocery run, and the tactics can be heavier than your problem needs.

World two is do-it-yourself: genuinely viable for the basics, and our Knowledge Center teaches it free. Your costs are a domain name each year, possibly simple website hosting, and your hours. World three — where we sit — is productized help for individuals: the audit, scoring, plan, site, and weekly watching automated into a subscription an individual can justify, with humans reviewing the sensitive cases.

Our prices, exactly

Protect: $39 setup, then $24/month (or $279/year) — for empty or thin results and people preparing before there's a problem. Build: $69 setup, then $69/month (or $799/year) — for career moves and name confusion, with 2 credits a month. Recover: $129 setup, then $159/month (or $1,819/year) — for a concerning result, with a human-reviewed plan and 4 credits a month. One domain and your website are included in every plan; monitoring is never metered. Credits for one-off extras start at $6 each (5 for $29, 20 for $109). We're building toward launch and billing isn't live yet — billing isn't live yet, everyone starts by choosing their situation at intake, and we'll never charge without telling you first.

Our pricing rule is in the plan math itself: each plan is priced at its all-in cost divided by 0.5, so the price covers costs with at least a 50% margin at scale. That's the whole trick to honest pricing in this category — enough margin to do the work properly, none of the mystery retainer.

• Protect — $39 + $24/mo: build before there's a problem.
• Build — $69 + $69/mo: career moves and name confusion.
• Recover — $129 + $159/mo: a concerning result, human-reviewed.
• Credits from $6 for one-off extras. Monitoring never metered.

Should I buy my name as a domain?

Usually yes, if your exact name domain is available at a standard price: it's the one search result you fully control, it anchors your profiles, and it costs about the price of a lunch per year at at-cost registrars (our chosen registrar direction is Cloudflare Registrar precisely because its renewal price doesn't jump after year one). What to avoid: panic-buying a dozen variations, paying premium aftermarket prices without a plan, or buying a domain you'll never put a real page on. One domain, one accurate site, kept current beats a portfolio of parked names.

How long does it take — and why time is a cost

Budget time honestly. Real improvement is measured in weeks to months: a new site must be crawled and earn its place; profiles update faster; brokers refresh on their own schedules; concerning results may never fully disappear. Our internal target is impressions in your own Search Console data within the first month or two for most launched sites — a target we measure, not a promise we sell. A provider quoting you days is quoting you fiction, and fiction invoices monthly.

How to compare providers without getting sold

Ask five questions. Do you scrape search results or use licensed data? Will you show me exactly what will be published, and does anything publish without my approval? Can you guarantee removal or rankings — and if they say yes to either, leave. What do you never do (listen for fake reviews, bought links, bogus takedowns)? And what's included versus metered? A trustworthy answer set is boring, specific, and a little disappointing on timelines. That's what honesty sounds like in this industry.

What free gets you (and where free stops)

Free, done properly, gets you surprisingly far: an honest map of your results, completed profiles, broker opt-outs filed, Google's personal-information tool used, and a simple page on your own domain if you are comfortable building one. Where free stops is time and structure — keeping the map current, turning confirmations into a score and a plan, drafting a site strictly from approved facts, and watching weekly so a new problem is a notification instead of a surprise discovered by a client. That ongoing structure is what a subscription is actually for, at any provider; if a pitch cannot explain its price in those terms, the price is probably for theatre.

One more cost to budget: your own attention. Every legitimate path asks a little of you — confirming results, approving facts, reviewing a draft — because nobody else can truthfully supply your judgment. Beware the fully hands-off promise for the mirror-image reason you beware the removal guarantee: reputation built without your knowledge has a way of containing things you would never have approved.

Renewals, totals, and the second-year question

Compare totals, not teasers. Introductory prices that triple at renewal are the oldest trick in websites and domains alike, which is why our registrar direction is at-cost renewal pricing and why our plans state setup, monthly, and annual figures side by side on one page. When you evaluate any provider, write down the full second-year cost: subscription, domain renewal, hosting, and the “extras” your situation will actually need. A plan that is honest in year two is usually honest in month one; a plan that hides year two is telling you how the relationship works.

The fairness note

We started this company because the price map was upside down: the people with the least protection — a tradesperson whose angry namesake outranks them, a clinician with one stale listing, a job seeker with an empty first page — were quoted executive retainers or sold suppression scams. Pricing for the rest of us is the product. If budget is the blocker, take this Knowledge Center (free to read) and do the first steps yourself; they're written to be used, not gated.