I agree with you here. It's not so much the pricing that bothers me. As long as I know about it in advance I can plan for it. The problem seems to be that a lot of customers didn't know about the extra costs in advance.

True, Adobe and other industry-standard software can run you into the thousands easily (trust me, we have CS5 so we know). The difference between those and SEO Powersuite is that there aren't continued costs just to be able to use the software. Updates, plug-ins or add-ons, maybe. But the base software does not stop functioning once you purchase it.

That's my only qualm at the moment. I don't know of too many desktop-based software solutions that stop functioning unless they were known to be limited trials. That's essentially what SEO Powersuite is looking like - a full-featured trial that you pay full price for. It's a little backwards for the software industry in general.

At this point, the customer service seems to be a little shoddy as well. I've just come on to the forum asking a questing, stating that I'm interested in purchasing the highest-level software and I've not yet received a response. That bothers me a little, as it's a simple sales question. For $1200 a year I'd really expect the customer service to be on point, so I hope for their sakes that they respond soon...

What do you mean? What are the subscription prices (not something we can see from the sales page before we purchase)? I saw that you could actually get discounts for the Live! plan. Is that not true?

COME ON GUYS - You GOT TO BE KIDDING ME - Right?

I'm new here but I'm a long way from new to the business.

Do you have ANY IDEA just how RIDICULOUSLY LOW PRICED LIVE PLAN IS?

Personally I think it is so low as to be laughable that anyone would even attempt a whine in public about those prices.

I have $400 into a product that was upgraded for an additional $100 and the upgrade was a useless piece of crap. (Which is why and how I ended up finding Link-Assistant's SEO Power Suite.)

I've also seen service after service that provided pieces of what Link-Assistant does for an up front fee of a year, then Google makes some unexpected change and they make some half *ssed attempt to compensate with their programming and the next thing you know they've freaking disappeared - POOF History GONE!

AND . . . so was my money.

These guys I mean really - "$3.05" per month on a 36 month extension for like Rank Tracker Pro ? ? ? . . . or if you are truly skiddish about a company being overseas (Non U.S.) then your looking at on $6.95/mo ...... gimme a break - that is SO CHEAP A PRICE somebody would have to be NUTS to think these guys are trying to get over on them or be shady about the way they are doing business.

If you don't want to "Pay for a Subscription" then you are letting semantics fog your mind. Look at it as upgrades. Everybody expects to pay a little something for upgrades.

Didn't mean to get on a rant here or go off on anybody but c'mon people - Get real .... AND YES - if I'm gonna plunk down $250 for something, you can bet I will read EVERY word on the product site. (Which I did and therefore knew about the "Live Plan.)

Just my 2₵ worth you understand . . .

I'm back at it and DeadIntoIt

I wouldn't say "ridiculously low", but reasonably priced for the Pro version. But why more for the Enterprise version? The data doesn't cost anymore to supply for the Enterprise version than the Pro version. They need to call it what it is - a subscription for the software itself. For me the problem isn't the cost, it's the misrepresentation. To make it look like you will own something useful after the initial cost only to realize that it won't work "at all" if you stop paying. That's the way a subscription works.

Agreed. I just wish the site was clear about that. I shouldn't have to stumble on a post in their forum to figure that out.

Again a person shouldn't have to find a link in a forum post to find out what the update costs will be. Just the fact that the primary link to find "Live Plan" pricing for the suite takes me to a page where a person has to type in a license code to see it tells me that they don't want people to see the pricing until after they've purchased. Why? Why isn't that information readily available?

Again "mighthave",

I have a hard time understanding how you can say you:

"have to find a link in a forum post to find out what the update costs will be."

I don't mean to be a stickler for details here, but what I said was:

"If I'm gonna plunk down $250 for something, you can bet I will read EVERY word on the product site".

Here is the link path:

Home page /

(First I want to see what this thing can do.)

So I click on the "Features and Editions" (2nd Click) link at the top of the home page. (From the home page this is click #1.)

Great information on the "Features and Editions" page and as I'm reading through I see an entire section of links in the right side bar that says "LEARN MORE". Well that is what I'm there for; so in the "Learn More" links there is a link titled "Software Prices". (3rd Cllick.)

What an amazing thing. 3 Clicks in a very natural due diligence path to learn more about a product I'm considering as an investment for my business and I learn that it's only $19.95 per month for continuing to have all the Power Suites programs and updates. WHAT? Personally I'm blown away by the low price.

I also find it pretty nice that Link-Assistant will allow me to only continue subscriptions on an individual basis. Most companies would force it down your throat to subscribe to updates for the entire sweet or hit the road jack.

Now I'm the first one to admit that maybe I go about researching a product a little different than other business people but still an all, if they actually are business professionals or aspiring to be professionals in their field, proper due diligence for capital expenditures is business 101.

So I have to respectfully disagree about the hard to find link.

I'll grant you it is not as prevalent as it could be, but again, if someone is seriously considering investing even $250, (Not to mention $500.00), avoiding putting our eyeballs in "Quick Scan" mode, many of us get into because we're in a hurry or for whatever reason, can certainly pay off in the short and in this case the long term to actually read every single word.

If someone just gets excited at the prospect of using something as powerful as SEO Power Suite, clicks on the order link/button and shells out the money, they deserve to get shocked in 6 months because they got in a hurry and decided to (Assume) ASS~U~ME they knew all they needed to know.

To me, It's just as simple as if they told me that this software has monthly fees, i would not have paid $600 for it in the first place. i have told my company that it hasn't but now i have to swallow my own words. Now, do I sound like a lier to my company? yes of course. But what the hell, i rather not tell them and pay for it myself. The fees is too high for me since i bought Enterprise version, this is ridiculous.

I'll be the first to admit that I *could* have missed that, I'm not infallible. But I'm finding it hard to believe I found my way to this point without seeing it. I DID find my way to the the product pricing and the live plan calculator. I did search the site for the info and couldn't find it. I also searched for a sales contact link to ask my question. I did search diligently enough to find the forum here and this thread. I did search diligently enough to find a link on the second page of this thread where the admin stated that all they had was the calculator that required a key and then provided another link to the subscription pricing info. So that information was added sometime after that post and prior to today. If that information was there prior to my initial posting, I apologize for missing it. Unfortunately out of all their pages that is one that isn't cached in the search engines so I can't see what it was before today. Still, based on recent posts, I'm not the only one who did't see it prior.

So given that the pricing info is there, all they need to do to make this thread moot, is to be clear that the Live Plan is not some optional update service. That it is necessary to keep the software functioning. They could call it the "Keep Your Software ALive" Plan.

I bought SEO PowerSuite a month ago and really like it. I did a bunch of research first, and it is a good solid piece of software. Period.

Now, the Live Update thing surprised me at first because I didn't read the order page (yes, before pushing the button) closely enough to consciously register the difference between Bug Fixes and Algorithm updates. Nevertheless, it is there and it does make sense in hindsight.

BUT, quality software these days very rarely comes w/o some kind of ongoing updates needed. Now I have Market Samurai and they are quite generous in their pricing, but SEO PowerSuite is a very mature product and certainly worth the investment.

I own a number of other relatively expensive software tools and all of them come with the subscription pricing model. It's pretty SOP for the software industry when extensive programming is required on an ongoing basis. My extensive-featured tracking software has an annual license fee for updates of 50% of the original purchase price and is certainly worth it. To this day, I still can't figure out how MS manages to *pay* all those programmers...

In any case, either subscriptions to monthly online web interface software sites or critical updates subscriptions are required by a lot of companies. And they do have to pay quality programmers to make them. You do want "quality" don't you?

It's just that the online marketing niche - in my opinion - is too used to getting "one-time payment" software or even free software use for valuable software tools. Obviously, if you've been around the block in this niche, you know that *they* have some pretty cheesy and sneaky pricing models that they use to monetize that software too other than "officially" calling it an update fee. Often far nastier than people are complaining about here.

Yes, I know that people feel deceived, but frankly, if the purchase is a high-dollar one for you, do the research, as some others mentioned here. Not just on the vendor site or their forum but also in the regular SERPs. It's not really that deceptive when you consider how easily others found the data. Confusing, maybe, but intentionally deceptive. At least I kind of doubt it.

In any case, just my humble opinion. But I wanted to counter some of the negativity here since not everyone who has bought these tools is upset. Just those few really angry ones ...

Again, I don't think that many of us are debating whether the software & live plan are fairly priced. The fact is that not all of the info is easy to find before a purchase is made. Yes, the software prices are available, but not the live plan prices. You have to enter a license key to see the prices, which means you would have already made a purchase. Not to mention, the site says that discounts are available for getting the live plan subscription for multiple licenses. But it seems like some folks haven't seen those discounts come time to renew. This is a bit shady to me for such a successful software. There shouldn't be anything to hide if the software is as good as everyone (including the company) says.

On a side note, I downloaded and attempted to try out the free versions of the suite today and was quite disappointed. It seems like nearly every feature is locked and requires a purchase to see certain info. It also seemed like only one project was allowed. After making a mistake on the first project and attempting to create a new one, it just kept bringing up the previous project. I also couldn't access anything but the Yahoo search engine (Google, Alexa and other stats are locked and require a purchase to unlock).

Now I know this is free software and I expected not to be able to do some things with it, but after reading the comparison on the site between SEO Powersuite's free versions and SEO Elite (by Brad Callen) I expected to be able to do much more. In a nutshell, I really couldn't access enough tools to even test this out. I was considering purchasing the Enterprise version but wanted to test out the free versions first. I'm not so sure now. With everything I'm seeing, hearing and experiencing I'm not too impressed.

I got SEO Elite free through a contest earlier this summer, so I think I'll test it out first and then see what happens...

i think i deserve some partial refund here.

please can you provide me with your trading address?

thankyou.