AskSami or a marketing agency: which one for getting your first users?

What a marketing agency is

A marketing agency is a company you pay to do the marketing: it runs the ads, writes the content and does the SEO, for a monthly fee called a retainer. The retainer pays for the agency's people. The money for the ads themselves is a second bill, as one agency's pricing page says:

What four agencies charge, on their own pages

There is no one price. These four publish figures on their own sites, each read on 8 October 2026. They are examples, not an average: Gripped says on its pricing page that most B2B marketing agencies hide their pricing.

• WebFX, a digital marketing agency. WebFX's SEO pricing page shows four priced plans. Each starts with an initial campaign investment marked as two months long, from $8,600 (Silver) to $21,400 (Diamond). Then comes a monthly price for the next four months of a 6 month commitment, from $2,800 to $9,200. The same page also advertises SEO services starting at $3,000 a month.
• Upgrow, in San Diego. Upgrow's pricing page lists paid media management starting from a $2,500 setup and $3,200 monthly, and SEO and AEO management from a $3,000 setup and $5,000 monthly, on an initial 12 month agreement. Within 90 days you can cancel for any reason. It says it typically works with paid media clients with a budget of at least $5,000 to $10,000 per month.
• Gripped, in London, for B2B SaaS and tech companies. Gripped's pricing page shows three tiers: Advisory or Execution from £3,500 a month plus project fees, Performance from £7,500 a month and Scale from £15,000 a month. It typically charges a one time onboarding fee.
• NoGood, a growth marketing agency in New York. NoGood's home page has no price list. It gives one figure, an average, not a minimum:

Smaller retainers exist. Ahrefs, a maker of SEO software, polled 439 SEO service providers. Its page, updated on 15 August 2024, does not say when the poll ran. Among the agencies, the most common monthly retainer was $500 to $1,000. It is a survey of people who sell SEO, not official data.

What AskSami is

AskSami is a marketing and distribution expert for founders who have launched a product and cannot get users or paying customers. You talk to Sami in the chat. AskSami reads what you give it, all of it optional: your GitHub repository, up to 40 pages of your live site, and the screenshots, ad exports and payment exports. From that it writes an honest read of why the product does or does not sell, and a ranked plan of up to ten ways to get customers, free methods before paid ones.

AskSami never posts anywhere for you, never spends your money and never writes to your code. You do those things yourself. Signing up is free, and so are your full honest read and your ranked plan. A plan gives you more of Sami. The paid plans are Starter $20, Growth $100 and Max $240 per month, paid a month at a time with no contract. How AskSami works sets out the rest.

Side by side

When an agency is the better pick

When the hard part is done and what is left is work.

• Your product already converts. Strangers pay, you know which channel brought them, and more of that channel would bring more of them.
• You have the money for both bills. The retainer, and the ad budget. Upgrow typically works with paid media clients with a budget of at least $5,000 to $10,000 per month.
• You have no time. An agency does the work. AskSami never does, so a plan from Sami that nobody carries out changes nothing.
• You can commit and wait. NoGood says organic channels typically take three to six months to build.

Gripped's home page puts the companies it helps at £2M to £20M of ARR, which is yearly recurring revenue:

When AskSami is the better pick

• Nobody has paid yet. There is nothing proven to scale, so the first job is to find out why the product does not sell. That is what the honest read is for. One case from the founder's own record: Ancestorii spent about £210 in its first seven days of ads, which brought about 15,000 visitors and no paying customer. Should I run ads before anyone has paid? has the rest.
• Your budget is nearer $20 a month than $2,800. $2,800 is the lowest monthly figure on the four agency pages, and it comes after an $8,600 initial investment.
• You have the time and want to do the work yourself. The plan puts free methods before paid ones, one family of channels at a time, and you carry it out.
• You cannot sign for six or twelve months. AskSami is paid a month at a time, with no contract.

One limit: AskSami launched on 19 September 2026, so it has no results of its own to quote, where an established agency can show you case studies.

Using both

They do different jobs, so the order matters more than the choice. While nobody has paid, use AskSami: work the plan one channel at a time and let the dated record show which channel brings paying customers. When one channel is proven and your own time is the limit, hire an agency for that channel and brief it from the record. Customer acquisition cost is the number to agree with it.

Before you sign, ask the four things these pages show can differ: the minimum term, the setup or onboarding fee, whether the ad budget is inside the fee, and the smallest budget the agency takes on.