How Much Should SEO Cost a Startup? A Stage-by-Stage Budget Guide

The Short Answer: What Most Startups Pay

Most agencies that serve small businesses charge under $1,000 a month. In SE Ranking's December 2024 survey of 260 agencies, 94% of which work with small or local clients, 64% set monthly retainers below $1,000, 30% charge less than $500, and 45% bill between $50 and $100 an hour. That is the band to budget against if you are pre-revenue or early, before you assume you need a full agency retainer.

Work backwards from that hourly rate to see what a retainer really buys. At $50 to $100 an hour, a $1,000 retainer covers roughly 10 to 20 hours of actual work a month.

Ten to twenty hours is not much when you spread it across research, writing, publishing, and technical cleanup, which is exactly why the price feels reasonable and the output often feels thin.

What matters more than the dollar figure is what those hours produce. "Foundational SEO" at this price should mean execution, not a report.

You want pages researched, written, and actually published to your site, internal links added, and your Search Console data watched to see what's ranking. A pretty audit PDF that tells you to "improve your content" and then leaves you to do it is not foundational SEO.

It's advice with an invoice attached. The next section breaks down exactly what should be on that invoice.

One caveat before the stage table below: funded B2B SaaS sits well above this range, often $1,500 to $4,500 a month and higher, because you're competing in categories where every rival has a content team.

That's covered in its own section, so treat the $1,000 to $1,500 midpoint as the starting point for a bootstrapped or seed-stage founder, not the ceiling for everyone.

What You're Actually Paying for When You Pay for SEO

Most SEO quotes fall into two buckets, and the price only makes sense once you know which one you're getting. Advice is someone telling you what to do.

Execution is someone actually doing it. A $1,500 retainer that buys you a strategy deck and a keyword spreadsheet is not the same as a $1,500 retainer that publishes pages, links them together, and tracks whether they climb.

Advice looks impressive because the artifacts are polished. You get an audit that flags broken pages and missing tags.

You get a keyword list ranked by search volume. You get a strategy document with a content calendar.

All of that has value. None of it moves your rankings by itself, because a to-do list is not a published page.

Here is what the execution side actually contains, named plainly so you can check any quote against it. Intent research figures out what a searcher wants when they type a phrase, so the page answers the real question instead of just matching words.

A topic map groups related pages into clusters so Google sees you as an authority on a subject, not a scatter of one-off posts. Content gap work finds the questions your competitors rank for and you don't. On-page SEO handles titles, headings, and internal structure so a page reads clearly to both people and crawlers.

Then there's the technical plumbing that decides whether Google even sees your work. A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the real one when duplicates exist, so you don't split your ranking signal across near-identical URLs.

Your sitemap is the file that lists your pages for Google to find. And tracking means watching your impressions (how often you show up in search) and position (your average rank for a query) inside Search Console, Google's own free tool that reports exactly how your site performs in results.

This is where audit-only engagements quietly fail you. The auditor hands over a document, invoices you, and leaves.

You're now holding a stack of tasks that require a writer, an editor, someone who knows canonical setup, and a way to publish. If you had those people already, you probably wouldn't have hired an outside audit.

So the audit becomes shelf-ware, and six months later your pages still show as discovered, not indexed (Google knows the URL exists but hasn't added it to results) or crawled, not indexed (Google looked and decided the page wasn't worth ranking, usually a sign of thin content).

The tracking piece matters more than most quotes admit, because it's how you find the cheap wins. A near-win is a page already ranking on page two, say position 11 to 20, that a small push can move onto page one where the clicks actually happen.

You can only spot near-wins if someone is reading your Search Console data every week, not once at the start. Index health is the plain term for what share of your pages Google has actually accepted into its results.

A quote that doesn't include ongoing tracking is selling you a launch with no follow-through.

This split, advice versus execution, is exactly the gap Satiara was built to close. Instead of paying one person for the audit, another to write, an editor to fix it, and a tool subscription to track it, the system does the whole loop as one workflow.

It studies your site, reads your real Search Console data, builds the topic map, writes and improves pages, connects them, handles the on-page and canonical details, and watches position and impressions afterward. You still supply the knowledge only your business has, and you keep control over what publishes.

The point is that you're paying for pages that ship, not a report you have to act on yourself. When you compare quotes later in this guide, the single most useful question is: does this price include the publishing, or just the plan?

A Stage-Based Budget: Bootstrapped, Seed, and Funded B2B SaaS

Your stage matters more than your headcount. A three-person team sitting on a Series A can spend where a bootstrapped founder chasing first revenue absolutely should not.

	Monthly range	What it buys
Bootstrapped / pre-revenue	$0 to $300	Tools or automation only, no retainer, protect runway
Seed	$1,000 to $1,500	Foundational execution, 10 to 20 hrs/month
Funded B2B SaaS	$1,500 to $4,500, $10,000+ large	Content velocity, technical upkeep, category coverage
Sanity check (all marketing)	8.96% mean, 5% median	Under $10M revenue averaged 13.3%

Match the number to your cash reality, not to what an agency tells you a "serious" company spends.

If you are pre-revenue, the honest answer is often do not hire an agency yet. A $3,000 retainer against zero revenue is a runway leak, not an investment.

Favor tools or an automation platform that publishes pages and reads your Search Console data, so you build index health and organic traffic without a monthly labor bill you cannot support.

At seed, foundational execution is worth paying for. The midpoint is $1,000 to $1,500 a month, which globally covers roughly 10 to 20 hours of monthly work.

That should mean pages that actually get crawled and indexed, not a stack of audits.

Funded B2B SaaS is a different story, and category competition is the reason. Medium firms average $1,500 to $4,500 per month, per SEOProfy, and large SaaS in a fought-over category can need $10,000 or more.

Why B2B SaaS runs hotter gets its own section below.

One sanity check before you commit to any number: The CMO Survey, fielded January 2026, put total marketing spend at a mean of 8.96% of company revenue, with a median of 5%. Smaller companies run higher, and firms under $10M in revenue averaged 13.3%. That is all marketing, not SEO alone, so run your own figure against it.

If your SEO spend blows past 10% of revenue and you have revenue to measure, you are overpaying for your stage.

Whichever stage you are in, the spend is only worth it if you are paying for published pages and improvements, not slides.

That is where an SEO operating system like Satiara fits the lean end: it studies your site, reads your real Search Console data, and publishes and improves pages as one workflow, so a bootstrapped or seed founder gets execution without stacking a strategist, writer, editor, and separate tools onto the invoice.

The Four Ways Startups Pay for SEO (With True Cost)

Every SEO dollar buys one of two things: someone telling you what to do, or someone actually doing it. That gap is where most startups overpay.

You can spend $2,000 a month and still be the one writing pages at 11pm because the invoice only covered advice.

Here are the four ways to pay, with your own time folded into the real cost.

The agency case has its own tradeoffs worth reading in full. If you're weighing whether to skip the retainer entirely, our SEO without an agency breakdown covers that side rather than repeating it here.

The trap in the middle two rows is the same. A freelancer who only gives you a strategy deck, or a tool that only surfaces a content gap, has handed the actual job back to you.

Writing the pages, mapping keywords so you don't create keyword cannibalization, linking related posts, publishing to your CMS, then checking Search Console to see what got crawled, not indexed. That is the work.

That is what eats your week.

Automation platforms exist because that work is repetitive enough to run as one continuous system instead of four separate jobs. This is where Satiara fits.

Rather than paying an SEO strategist to plan, a writer to draft, an editor to polish, and a tool subscription to track, one system studies your site, reads your real Search Console data, builds a topic map, writes and publishes pages, connects them, and watches impressions and position to find the next near-win.

You supply the goals and the knowledge only your business has. It supplies the hours.

One caution on the cheap end. Any provider or tool advertising real, published SEO for under $150 a month is almost certainly selling thin content that won't rank or, worse, spun pages that risk your index health.

A separate section covers those red flags. For now, treat a price that low as a signal to look harder, not a bargain.

The Hidden Cost of Doing SEO Yourself

DIY SEO is never free. It just moves the cost off your invoice and onto your calendar, where you stop counting it.

Here is one month, tracked honestly, for a founder writing and publishing four articles targeting real search intent.

• Keyword and intent research: pulling Search Console for near-wins, checking what already ranks, building a small topic map, and spotting content gaps. Call it 6 hours.
• Writing: four articles at roughly 3 hours each once you account for outlining and fact-checking. 12 hours.
• Editing: tightening drafts, verifying every citation is a real source and not something you half-remembered, cutting thin sections. 4 hours.
• Publishing: formatting in your CMS, setting canonicals, adding internal links between related pages so they don't compete for the same query (keyword cannibalization is a real drag on new content). 3 hours.
• Tracking: checking impressions and position weekly, watching for "crawled, not indexed" or "discovered, not indexed" in Search Console. 3 hours.

That is 28 hours a month. Not a stretch estimate.

A realistic one for someone doing it carefully.

Now price the hour. The skill you're substituting has a market rate.

An average SEO specialist earns around $70,000 a year, per Glassdoor's 2025 data. Loaded with taxes and overhead, that's roughly $45 to $50 an hour for the work itself.

At $45, your 28 hours cost $1,260 a month.

Notice what just happened. The "free" option landed above a $1,000 execution service, and that's before you factor in that a specialist does in 15 hours what takes you 28, because they already know the workflow.

Your own hour is worth more than a specialist's, though, which is the part founders skip. If your time is realistically worth $100 an hour when spent on product or sales conversations (a conservative number pre-revenue), those same 28 hours represent $2,800 in opportunity cost.

That's agency-tier spending, paid in the currency you have least of.

The trap is that the calendar cost is invisible. No line item, no receipt, so it feels like $0.

Meanwhile the four hours you spent chasing an indexing bug in Search Console were four hours not spent closing a customer or shipping a feature that keeps one from churning.

This is the pain most tools ignore: you don't want to become an SEO specialist, and you can't afford to donate 28 hours a month to acting like one.

That's exactly the work Satiara folds into one system, the research, the writing, the internal linking, and the Search Console tracking that would otherwise be split across a strategist, a writer, an editor, and a stack of tools you'd have to babysit.

The four-ways comparison below prices each lane with your own time included, so you can see where that 28 hours actually goes.

Why B2B SaaS SEO Costs More

B2B SaaS SEO runs more than most startup categories because you're paying to compete for the same searches your funded competitors have already invested in. Medium SaaS firms average $1,500 to $4,500 per month, and large ones often need $10,000 or more (SEO budget benchmarks).

The number climbs for a plain reason: the terms that bring you buyers are also the terms every competitor is bidding on, both in ads and in content depth.

Category ownership is the real cost driver. To rank for "best [your category] software" or "[competitor] alternative," you can't publish a 600-word blog post and wait.

You need comparison pages, integration guides, use-case pages, and feature explainers that go deeper than what already sits at the top of the SERP. Deeper content takes more research hours, more subject expertise, and more editing.

That's what the higher retainer buys.

Fast-publishing SaaS blogs hit two specific problems, and both quietly waste budget. The first is keyword cannibalization: two or more of your pages target the same query, so they split impressions and neither ranks well.

The second is thin content: pages shipped quickly to hit a publishing quota that don't answer the search intent, so Google marks them "crawled, not indexed" and they never earn organic traffic. Both come from writing without a topic map, a plan that assigns each keyword to exactly one page and links related pages together.

This is where paying for execution matters more than paying for advice. An SEO strategist plans the clusters, a writer produces the depth, an editor catches the cannibalization, and a tool tracks Search Console.

Satiara runs that as one workflow: it reads your real Search Console data, builds a keyword-to-page map so two pages never fight for the same term, and flags near-wins already sitting on page two.

You keep control of the clusters, voice, and whether pages publish or wait in review, and destructive moves like consolidations or redirects are never applied silently.

For the tactics behind category ownership and comparison demand, see the B2B SaaS SEO strategy pillar, and check the SaaS use case at satiara.com/help.

What a Fair SEO Price Must Include

A quote is only fair if it buys you live URLs on Google, not a slide deck of recommendations. Before you sign anything, hold the offer against this checklist.

Each item names what the provider does and what you actually get for it.

1. Published pages, not drafts. Ask how many pages go live on your site each month. The outcome you're paying for is indexable URLs, not a folder of Google Docs you still have to format, upload, and publish yourself.
2. Intent and keyword research tied to real demand. The provider maps queries people actually type to specific pages, so each page targets a search with traffic behind it. The outcome: a keyword-to-page plan you can see, not a vague promise to "target relevant terms."
3. Internal linking between related pages. New pages get connected to existing ones on your site. The outcome is that Google can crawl your topic cluster and pass authority across it, instead of publishing orphan pages that sit unlinked and rarely get indexed.
4. CMS publishing handled for you. The work lands in WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, or whatever you run, formatted and ready. The outcome: you skip the copy-paste tax that quietly eats hours every month.
5. Tracking in Google Search Console. The provider connects to your Search Console and reports on impressions, position, and index health per page. The outcome is proof each page got crawled and indexed, plus early signals on near-wins (pages ranking on page two that a small push can move up).

The single question that separates real work from advice: how many pages ship per month, and who publishes them? If the answer is "we deliver a strategy" or "we send you an audit," you're buying a document, not results. That's the red flag.

A report you have to act on yourself is not execution, and it should not cost an execution price. (For the fuller breakdown of what sits behind an SEO invoice, see "What You're Actually Paying For When You Pay for SEO.")

Watch for the gap between deliverables and live URLs. Some providers count "10 blog posts" as a line item, then hand you drafts and call the job done.

Draft to published is your problem to solve, and it's where most startup content stalls in a Google Drive nobody opens again.

This checklist is exactly the list of jobs that gets split across an SEO strategist, a writer, an editor, and a stack of tools. Automation earns its place when one workflow covers every line above end to end.

Satiara, for example, studies your site, reads your real Search Console data, builds the keyword-to-page map, writes and publishes the pages, links them together, and watches how they perform, with you choosing whether work stays in review or goes live.

When you compare quotes, use this checklist as the floor: if a provider covers only two or three items, you'll pay separately (in cash or your own hours) to finish the rest.

How to Spot Underpriced or Shady SEO

The cheaper the quote, the more careful you need to be. Below about $150 a month, the math simply doesn't work.

Real SEO involves intent research, writing, publishing, and technical cleanup, and a competent SEO specialist earns north of $70,000 a year (Glassdoor, 2025). At $99 or $49 a month, nobody is doing that work.

Something else is happening, and it usually isn't good for your site.

Here's what those bargain providers are actually selling, and what it costs you:

• Guaranteed #1 rankings. No one controls Google's algorithm, so nobody can promise position 1. This claim means they'll chase easy, no-traffic keywords to "prove" a ranking, or they're lying outright. You pay for a screenshot, not organic traffic.
• Private link networks (PBNs). Paid links from a network of junk sites violate Google's spam policies. When Google catches it, and it does, your pages can drop out of the index entirely. Undoing a manual penalty takes months.
• No reporting access. If a provider won't connect to your Google Search Console or show you which URLs were crawled, not indexed versus actually ranking, you can't verify a single thing they claim. That's the point. Opacity hides inactivity.
• Mass-generated thin content. Dozens of near-identical pages spun out to hit a keyword count. This creates keyword cannibalization (your own pages competing against each other) and thin content Google won't rank. Worse, it can pull down the pages that were working.

The most dangerous failure mode in cheap AI SEO is invented sources. A model asked to sound authoritative will fabricate studies, statistics, and citations that look real and aren't. Publish one made-up stat under your brand, and you've told every reader, and every AI system quoting you, that your site can't be trusted.

It's a slow, quiet way to burn credibility.

You can catch this before you sign.

Ask any provider to show you a live sample and then check three things: click every citation and confirm the page exists and says what they claim; search a quoted statistic to see if the source is real; and read for the generic, could-be-anyone tone that signals a template with your name pasted in.

If they can't produce a sample that survives that, walk.

A fair floor exists for a reason. Most startups land around $1,000 to $1,500 a month for foundational work because that covers real research, published pages, internal linking, and tracking you can see.

What you're buying at that floor is verifiable output, not a promise. If you want the deeper price breakdown by stage, the budget table earlier in this guide has it.

Verification is where an operating system beats a cheap shop. Satiara reads your real Search Console data, so every claim about impressions, position, and index health is grounded in Google's own numbers, not a vendor's dashboard.

Every citation is fetched and checked against the live source before a page ships, and a statistic with no source behind it goes back to the editor to be sourced or taken out. And because you approve goals, clusters, voice, and whether work publishes or waits in review, there's no black box quietly doing something you'd regret.

Destructive moves like consolidations and redirects are never applied silently. You can request a demo and watch the checks run before you trust it with a single page.

When SEO Pays off for a Startup

SEO is a delayed payoff, and that timing is exactly what makes the spend feel scary before revenue exists. Ahrefs' 2025 study of newly published pages found that only 1.74% of them reach Google's top 10 within a year, and of the few that get there, 40.82% arrive within the first month. The honest read is not that ranking takes a fixed number of months. It is that most pages never rank at all, so you are buying attempts, and you need two quarters of them before you can judge whether the ones that landed are worth the spend.

That gap is the whole question. So let's price it.

Say you budget $1,200 a month for foundational SEO. That covers intent research, published pages, and internal linking, not just an audit.

Over the first six months you spend $7,200 and see almost nothing: a few hundred impressions, some pages sitting at position 15 to 25, no signups yet. That's normal.

The pages are crawled and indexed but not yet ranking where clicks happen.

Now watch months 7 through 12. Your topic cluster starts holding page-one positions on the buyer-intent terms.

Suppose those pages pull 900 organic visitors a month, and your product converts trial signups at 3%. That's 27 signups a month from organic.

At a $1,200 spend, your cost per organic signup is about $44, and it keeps dropping because the pages stay ranked without new spend. Compare that to your paid-acquisition cost per signup.

If paid is running you $120 a signup, the math flips fast.

The three-year view is where SEO earns its keep. Optimized mid-to-large campaigns average a return of $7.48 for every $1 invested over three years (Terakeet via Search Engine Journal).

Published pages that rank don't churn like an ad budget. They compound.

The same $7,200 you spent in year one keeps returning traffic in years two and three at no added cost, which is what pulls that multiple so high.

Here's the honest part. SEO is not worth paying for yet if any of these are true:

• No product-market fit. If you're still changing what you sell every month, ranking pages will describe a product that no longer exists by the time they rank. Wait.
• No live site, or a site with nothing to build on. There's no topic map to grow and no old pages to improve. Get the site and a handful of real pages up first.
• No content foundation. Thin pages with one paragraph each give search engines nothing to rank and nothing to link between. You'd be paying to fix a house with no frame.

If those boxes are checked, the payback case is straightforward, and the risk sits mostly in month-one-through-six patience. What you don't want is to spend that money on advice and audits while the actual pages never get published.

That execution gap is where most startup SEO money disappears, and it's exactly the problem an SEO operating system like Satiara is built to close: it reads your real Google Search Console data, finds the winnable terms, and publishes and improves the pages as one continuous workflow instead of splitting the work across a strategist, writer, and editor who each hand you a document.

Do You Lose Control If You Automate?

No, you don't lose control, and the reason comes down to how the automation is scoped. The real fear behind "autopilot SEO" is a system quietly pushing thin, off-brand pages under your domain, or worse, restructuring your site while you sleep.

That fear is legitimate. A tool that publishes generic filler in your name does more damage than doing nothing.

So the useful question isn't "automated or not," it's "what stays your decision."

With Satiara, you set the boundaries up front. You choose the business goal, the topic clusters you want to own, who on your team has access, the brand voice, and the publishing mode.

That last one matters most for control: you decide whether work sits in a review queue for your sign-off or publishes automatically once it meets your rules. A cautious founder keeps everything in review.

A founder drowning in other work flips specific clusters to auto-publish and spot-checks later. Same system, different comfort level.

Brand voice isn't a setting you have to hand-write either. Satiara reads your existing posts and pulls your logo, colors, and font straight from your site, so new pages match what you already sound like instead of reading like a template someone bolted your name onto.

You can still adjust it, but the default is your default.

The part that separates real control from the illusion of it: structural changes are never applied silently. Consolidating two competing pages, adding a redirect, changing a canonical, these are the moves that can tank rankings if done wrong.

Satiara surfaces them as recommendations you approve, not actions it takes behind your back. You keep the knowledge only you have, and the system keeps the parts you'd rather not babysit.

Two things anchor the trust here. First, it works from your live Google Search Console data, so the pages it prioritizes are based on what's actually happening in your SERP (real impressions, real positions, real near-wins), not guesses.

Second, every citation in a published page is fetched and checked against the live source, and a figure that no source supports is removed rather than published. If you want to watch that in action before committing, request a demo and see the review queue and the approval steps for yourself.

Which Option Fits Your Startup

Match your situation to a lane. Three cover most startups.

Pre-revenue and time-poor. You have no budget for a $3,000 agency retainer and no spare hours to write pages yourself. An agency here is the wrong call, and doing it manually means trading founder time worth far more than the work.

Your best fit is an automation platform that publishes real pages, not a keyword tool you have to babysit.

This is the lane where an SEO operating system like Satiara earns its place: it studies your site, reads your Google Search Console data, and turns opportunities into published pages as one workflow, replacing the strategist, writer, editor, and tool stack you can't afford to hire separately.

Seed with some budget. You can spend $1,000 to $2,500 a month, the tier most startups land in. You could hire a freelancer, but the true cost includes your time managing them.

The stronger move is to run automation for consistent output and add a freelancer or specialist for the few things software shouldn't touch: sales narrative, product positioning, the knowledge only you have. Keep publishing in review mode at first so you approve before anything goes live.

Funded SaaS chasing a category. You need topic coverage across dozens of clusters, comparison pages, and consistent updates, which is why B2B SaaS SEO runs higher. Agencies work here if the retainer buys execution, not just audits.

Automation still fits because category ownership is a volume-and-maintenance problem, exactly what a continuous system handles. See the SaaS use case for how category and comparison demand map to a plan.

When does automation beat an agency? When you need pages shipped and maintained on a repeatable schedule and can't justify $3,000+ a month.

When does it not? When your growth depends on relationships, digital PR, or link acquisition that requires human outreach, or when your content demands deep original research a system can't source.

Automation handles the operating work. It doesn't replace a strategist for a one-off market-entry play.

What to do this week:

• Open Search Console and note how many pages show crawled, not indexed or discovered, not indexed. That gap is free work waiting.
• Set a number using the 5 to 10 percent of revenue benchmark, or a fixed floor if you're pre-revenue. Anything under $150 a month is a red flag, not a bargain.
• Pick your lane above and price one option against your own time, not just the invoice.

If autonomous execution is your lane, the control question matters, and the answer is that you keep it: you choose the goals, clusters, brand voice, and whether work stays in review or publishes automatically, and destructive structural changes like consolidations and redirects are never applied silently.

Request a demo to watch the system read your Search Console data and build a plan before you commit a dollar.

Where to Go From Here

Before you send a single quote to a vendor, ask them one question: how many pages ship per month, and who publishes them? That question sorts every option in this guide into advice or execution faster than any pricing table, because a provider who dodges it is selling you a document at an execution price.

If you're weighing whether to run the work yourself or hand it to a system, these pages show how the execution side actually gets covered:

• How Satiara works, if you want to see the full research-to-publish loop as one workflow
• SEO on autopilot, for the control question of what publishes and what waits in review
• SEO for SaaS, if you're the funded B2B founder facing category competition

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Check Whether an SEO Provider's Published Pages Are Actually Getting Indexed?

Ask the provider to connect to your Google Search Console and show you the index status per URL. Look specifically for pages marked 'crawled, not indexed' or 'discovered, not indexed,' which mean Google either decided the page wasn't worth ranking or hasn't added it yet.

A provider unwilling to share that view is hiding whether the work landed at all.

Can I Start With Automation Now and Move to an Agency Later as I Grow?

Yes. Many founders use an automation platform at the bootstrapped and seed stage to build index health and a topic map without a labor retainer, then layer in agency or specialist help once revenue supports it and category competition demands more depth.

The pages you publish early keep ranking, so nothing is wasted in the switch.

What Should I Do If I Already Paid for an Audit and Now Have a Pile of Tasks I Can't Execute?

An audit is only useful once someone acts on it. If you don't have a writer, an editor, and someone who understands canonical setup and publishing, the audit becomes shelf-ware.

Your options are hiring for those roles, doing the work yourself and counting the calendar cost, or using a system that turns the plan into published pages. Don't pay for a second audit before you've executed the first.

How Much of My Revenue Should SEO Actually Be?

There is no fixed ratio, and the honest answer depends on whether you have revenue at all. If you do, and your SEO line alone passes 10% of it, you are overpaying for your stage. Pre-revenue the percentage math breaks down entirely, which is why protecting runway matters more than hitting a target ratio at that point.

Pre-revenue, the percentage math breaks down, which is why runway protection matters more than a target ratio at that point.