App store optimization services vs doing it yourself

Search for app store optimization services and you get three kinds of page: agency sales pages with no prices, tool vendors explaining why you should buy a tool instead, and, on the first page of results, at least one vendor openly selling incentivized installs and bulk reviews with a published per-unit price list. You also get a couple of results about Administrative Services Only, an unrelated HR outsourcing model that shares the acronym.

This is a comparison written by a tool vendor, so treat our conclusion with the same suspicion you should apply to everyone else's. What we can do is show the numbers with their sources labelled, including the cases where the honest answer is that nobody publishes a price.

What an ASO service actually delivers

Strip the positioning from a dozen agency pages and the scope is remarkably consistent. Six deliverables appear on essentially every one:

1. Keyword research per market, producing a semantic core rather than a list, ideally rebuilt for each language rather than translated.
2. Metadata optimization for title, subtitle, keyword field, short and full description, per store and per locale.
3. Creative optimization and A/B testing of icon, screenshots and preview video, run through Apple Product Page Optimization and Google Play Store Listing Experiments.
4. Localization of metadata and creatives for target markets.
5. Competitor and category tracking.
6. Reporting, usually monthly at entry tiers and weekly at premium ones.

Notice what is not on that list: nobody is doing anything you cannot do. There is no privileged access, no back channel to Apple, no ranking API. What an agency sells is hours and judgement, applied consistently.

What it costs

Here is the awkward truth about this section. Of the agencies that rank for this keyword, the credible ones publish no pricing at all. Phiture, Moburst, Yodel Mobile and Gummicube all say contact us. The only vendors publishing detailed per-unit prices are the ones selling installs and reviews. Everything below therefore comes from third-party estimates, and every one of those sources sells either a competing agency service or a tool.

Against that, the tooling side is knowable, because tool vendors publish prices. Paid ASO tools start at $9.99 per month and mid tiers land between $150 and $500. Apple charges $99 a year for the Developer Program and Google charges $25 once. We compared the tools and their actual verified prices in our ASO tools comparison.

The gap is not subtle. The cheapest credible agency retainer is roughly twenty times the cost of a good tool subscription. That gap is labour, and whether it is worth paying depends entirely on whether anyone on your side has the hours.

The real comparison is with your own time

Doing ASO yourself is not free, it is just a different budget line. Honest accounting for a two-store app in three or four markets:

Call it fifteen to thirty hours to get set up and three to six hours a month to keep it moving. If a founder or a product marketer has that, tools plus discipline beats a low-end retainer, because nobody understands your positioning better than you do. If nobody has that, the tool subscription becomes shelfware and the agency is the cheaper option despite costing twenty times more.

The break-even

There are effectively four rungs, and the decision between them is about who owns the hours, not about capability:

That last line is worth stating plainly, because agencies rarely will. A $120,000 base salary loads to something like $165,000 to $226,000 all in with taxes, benefits, equipment and tooling. Once a retainer passes that annualised, you are paying agency margin for work an employee would do with far better product context.

A cheaper intermediate step that almost nobody offers you: buy a one-off audit rather than a retainer. You get the senior read on your listing, the keyword gaps and the creative direction, and you execute it yourself. If the audit is good, it pays for itself immediately. If it is generic, you learned that for a few thousand dollars instead of a year of retainer.

The vendors you should walk away from

This is the part the agency comparison pages leave out, and it matters more than any pricing table. Vendors selling app store manipulation rank on the same search results as legitimate agencies, use the same vocabulary, and publish price lists that make them look like the transparent option.

What they sell, in their own words, is keyword installs priced per install, ratings priced per rating, and reviews priced per review, including guaranteed reviews delivered on a schedule. The pricing is real. So are the consequences: buying installs, ratings or reviews violates both stores' guidelines, and enforcement ranges from update rejection to permanent removal of the app and termination of the developer account. Removal for manipulation is frequently not reversed on appeal.

Concrete warning signs, in order of how damning they are:

• A guaranteed ranking or a guaranteed number of reviews. Nobody can guarantee either without buying them.
• Pricing per install, per rating or per review. That is the product, stated openly.
• Results promised in days. Metadata takes weeks to index. Anything faster is traffic, not optimization.
• Vagueness about where installs come from. Ask directly whether any installs, ratings or reviews are delivered by the agency or any subcontractor, and get the answer in the contract.
• Case studies with no methodology. A ranking chart with a vertical line and no explanation of what changed is not evidence.

Questions to ask before signing

Six questions separate a good agency from a competent-sounding one. The answers should be specific.

1. Where does your keyword data come from? A named tool or their own dataset. If they cannot answer, they are reselling a $79 subscription.
2. How do you separate iOS and Android strategy? Apple has a keyword field, Google does not. An agency treating both the same has not done this before.
3. What is the update cadence, and who publishes? Do they push metadata to your consoles, or hand you a document?
4. How do you measure success? The right answer includes conversion rate and installs, not just keyword position.
5. Can I see a sample competitive analysis? Redacted is fine. Refusal is not.
6. What do I keep if I leave? The keyword research, the creative source files and the test history should be yours. Get it in writing.

What to do this week either way

Whether you hire someone or not, the same three things move first, and doing them yourself first makes any later agency engagement cheaper because you arrive with a baseline instead of a blank page.

1. Fix the metadata fields you already control. The field-by-field differences between the stores are in our metadata comparison.
2. Rewrite the first two screenshots, which carry most of your conversion.
3. Start replying to reviews, which is unglamorous, measurable, and something agencies charge for. Our review reply system takes about an hour a week.

Then run one experiment and wait the full four to eight weeks for significance. If after a quarter of that you have no keyword movement and no conversion change, you have a real reason to buy help, and you have the baseline data to brief them with.

Frequently asked questions

If the do-it-yourself route is where you land, AppBoard handles the listing, screenshot and review side of it in one panel and is free while it is in beta.