6 Best Refine Labs Alternatives (2026)🥇

Refine Labs is not the company most people are searching for anymore.

Chris Walker, the founder whose podcast and LinkedIn presence built the Refine Labs name, stepped away from the company in July 2025. CEO Megan Bowen became majority owner, Grandin Holdings came in as a strategic investor, and Grandin founder Mark Homer joined the board. Refine Labs’ own page for Walker now states plainly that he is no longer involved in day-to-day operations.

The agency is still operating and still good at what it does. But two things have changed that matter if you are evaluating them.

First, the thought leadership engine that drove most inbound interest left with the founder. Second, and more importantly, Refine Labs’ pricing page now states that they serve mid-market and enterprise B2B SaaS companies at $50M+ ARR, with full-service management starting at $31,000 per month.

If you are a founder-led SaaS company doing $2M to $20M ARR, you are not their ideal customer profile. That is not a criticism of Refine Labs. It is a fit problem, and it is the single most common reason teams end up on this page.

This guide covers 6 agencies that serve different segments of the B2B market, with pricing verified against each agency’s own published sources in July 2026.

Quick decision framework

• Need organic pipeline through SEO, AI search, and CRO? → SERPsculpt
• Need paid acquisition with RevOps and attribution? → ProperExpression
• Need an entire marketing function including a fractional CMO? → Kalungi
• Already run on HubSpot and need it to convert? → Lean Labs
• Based in the UK or selling into EU markets? → Gripped
• Need Reddit, LLM visibility, and editorial distribution at scale? → Foundation

Refine Labs alternatives comparison table

All pricing below comes from each agency’s own published pricing page or verified Clutch profile. Where an agency does not publish pricing, that is stated rather than estimated.

Agency	Best for	Investment	Pricing source	Key differentiator
SERPsculpt	Founder-led B2B SaaS needing organic pipeline	$4,988 one-off, or $7,426–$12,328/mo	Published	Bottom-of-funnel first, senior-only delivery
ProperExpression	Paid acquisition with RevOps attribution	$5,000–$10,000/mo	Clutch verified	Full-stack performance marketing plus RevOps
Kalungi	Companies with no marketing function at all	~$6,500/mo coaching to ~$45,000/mo full service	Third-party reported	Fractional CMO plus full execution team
Lean Labs	HubSpot-native SaaS from Seed to Series C	From $2,000/mo	Published	HubSpot depth plus agentic AI content system
Gripped	UK and EU B2B SaaS at £2M–£50M ARR	From £3,500/mo, typical £8,000–£12,000/mo	Published	Publishes full pricing, 30-day sprint cadence
Foundation	Enterprise content, Reddit, and LLM visibility	Not published	Not published	Reddit strategy and GEO at brand scale
Refine Labs	Mid-market and enterprise SaaS at $50M+ ARR	$20,000–$31,000+/mo	Published	Demand creation and paid media at scale

What each agency actually does

Capability	SERPsculpt	ProperExpression	Kalungi	Lean Labs	Gripped	Foundation
SEO strategy	Core service	Secondary	Included in full service	Included	Core service	Core service
AI answer visibility (GEO/AEO)	Core service	Not stated	Not stated	Core service (AEO)	Core service (GEO)	Core service
Paid media	No	Core service	Included in full service	No	Core service	No
CRO	Core service	Included	Included	Core service	Included	No
Fractional CMO	No	No	Core service	No	No	No
Content production	In-house, senior	Included	Included	Agentic system with human review	In-house	In-house editorial
Reddit and community	Included	No	No	No	Paid Reddit only	Core service
Who delivers the work	Founders on every account	Senior team	Associate CMO plus pod	Hybrid team plus AI system	Dedicated AM plus specialists	Editorial team

1. SERPsculpt: best for founder-led B2B SaaS

Best for: B2B SaaS companies between roughly $1M and $20M ARR with real revenue but no internal marketing team, who need organic search and AI answer visibility to produce signups and demos.

Not for: Companies that need paid media managed, a fractional CMO, or a full go-to-market function built from scratch. If your bottleneck is that nobody owns marketing strategy at all, Kalungi is the better call. If your bottleneck is ad spend efficiency, ProperExpression or Gripped will serve you better.

Best for	B2B SaaS at roughly $1M–$20M ARR with revenue but no internal marketing team
Not for	Teams needing paid media, a fractional CMO, or a full GTM function built from scratch
Investment	$4,988 one-off, or $7,426–$12,328/mo on a 3-month minimum
Delivered by	Tanja Gavrilovic and Bill Gaule, personally, on every account
Pricing source	serpsculpt.com/pricing

Refine Labs built its reputation on demand creation: ungated content, paid social that does not optimise for conversions, and being top of mind before a buyer enters the market. That model works, and it works best when you already have brand recognition and a budget that can absorb 12 months of brand investment before pipeline follows.

SERPsculpt works the opposite end of the funnel first. We start with the queries a buyer runs when they are already comparing vendors, then work backwards. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, use case pages, and integration pages before top-of-funnel blog content. The reason is simple: those queries convert at a far higher rate, they produce revenue signal inside 90 days rather than 12 months, and they give you something to show the board while the slower compounding work builds underneath.

The second difference is where your buyers now look. B2B buyers build a shortlist before they contact anyone, and increasingly they build it inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews rather than the ten blue links. We structure content so it is extractable by those systems and cited in those answers, which is a different technical discipline to ranking a blog post.

The third difference is who does the work. Tanja Gavrilovic and Bill Gaule run every account personally. There are no interns, no junior account managers, and no white-label subcontractors. That is a real constraint on how many clients we can take, and it is why we are not the right fit for a company that needs twenty articles a month.

Verified client results

• 611% year-over-year organic growth for a B2B SaaS client
• 540% increase in monthly trial signups
• 3x increase in blog-driven signups, adding $36,000 in lifetime value
• Link My Books: 58.1% trial signup lift and a 207-position keyword ranking improvement (sourced from our Clutch profile)

Clients include Link My Books, TubeBuddy, Friday Pulse, DialMyCalls, Forma, Durable, and Wisa.

How SERPsculpt works

Phase	What happens
Discovery and research	Product, ICP, customer data, and competitive landscape, to find the queries your buyers actually run before they buy
Strategy sprint, weeks 1–4	SEO and content audit, topic mapping tied to funnel stage, ICP-based angles, AI visibility planning built in from the start
Execution sprint, ongoing	Briefs, production, internal linking, landing page CRO, AI visibility monitoring
Reporting and analysis	Monthly review of signups, conversion paths, traffic quality, and search plus AI ranking movement

Discovery and research. We go deep on your product, ICP, existing customer data, and competitive landscape to find the queries your buyers actually run before they buy.

Strategy sprint, weeks 1 to 4. Full SEO and content audit, topic mapping tied to funnel stage, ICP-based angles, and AI visibility planning built in from the start rather than bolted on later.

Execution sprint, ongoing. Content briefs, production, internal linking, landing page CRO, and AI visibility monitoring. Every piece is tied to a measurable objective.

Reporting and analysis. Monthly review covering signups, conversion paths, traffic quality, and search plus AI ranking movement.

SERPsculpt pricing

All figures below are current as published on our pricing page.

Gold: $4,988 one-time, 6 weeks delivery

For in-house teams that need the plan and will execute it themselves.

• SEO, GEO, and content strategy
• ICP research
• Content and website audit
• Content workbook and 6-month plan
• One-time support consultation

Platinum: $7,426/month, 3-month minimum

Everything in Gold, plus:

• 10 monthly briefs and outlines
• 10 blog articles tied to business goals
• Tracking and reporting
• Internal linking updates every 3 months
• CRO and CTR SERP optimisation, up to 3 revisions per post
• 1 monthly strategy call

Diamond: $12,328/month, 3-month minimum

Everything in Platinum, plus:

• 20 monthly briefs and outlines
• 20 blog articles tied to business goals
• Enterprise technical SEO
• Cross-department content alignment
• Centralised content blocks for reuse and rapid updates
• Complex site architecture planning for multi-brand and multi-subdomain setups
• Sales and revenue enablement content
• Weekly executive reviews and quarterly business planning

Add-ons: YouTube script conversion from 4 blog posts at $1,000/month. Link building from $2,500/month. Digital PR from $700/month.

You can cancel with 30 days notice. For context, Platinum sits at roughly a quarter of Refine Labs’ published full-service starting price of $31,000 per month.

See if we are a fit

Talk to Our Strategy Team

2. ProperExpression: best for paid acquisition with RevOps attribution

Best for: Mid-sized B2B companies that already have traction and want to scale through paid channels with tight CRM attribution.

Not for: Companies whose primary need is organic search or content. Paid and RevOps are the centre of gravity here, and content is supporting cast.

ProperExpression runs a full-stack performance marketing model with RevOps built in. The value is the connection between ad spend, CRM workflow, and closed revenue, rather than lead volume. They work closely with sales teams on pipeline reviews and cold email alongside paid search and paid social.

Their Clutch profile shows 12 reviews, with clients citing effectiveness, transparency, and adaptability. One reviewer noted spending unnecessary time and budget cross-checking HubSpot recommendations rather than trusting the team, and advised future clients to lean on their expertise sooner.

Where they beat SERPsculpt: Paid media management and CRM attribution. We do not run ads.

ProperExpression pricing

Clutch lists a minimum project size of $5,000+, an average hourly rate of $150 to $199, and typical monthly project costs between $5,000 and $10,000. They do not publish pricing on their own site.

3. Kalungi: best for companies with no marketing function at all

Best for: B2B SaaS companies that need marketing leadership and execution simultaneously, typically because there is no senior marketer in the building.

Not for: Companies that already have a VP of Marketing or Head of Growth. You would be paying for leadership you already have.

Kalungi has restructured since 2025 into three engagement models banded by ARR, which makes self-selection much easier than it used to be:

• Full Service for post-product-market-fit SaaS at $5M to $10M ARR, positioned as replacing 10+ hires, with pay-for-performance available
• Syntropy for scaling teams at $1M to $5M ARR, where you keep execution in-house and buy senior GTM guidance
• T2D3 for pre-PMF and seed stage at $0 to $1M ARR, where you get the playbooks and run them yourself, with CMO coaching available

The T2D3 framework is published and widely known, with over 14,000 playbook purchases according to their site. They report 150+ SaaS clients and an NPS of 83. Documented case studies include DataGuard at 330% MQL growth and $4M in pipeline, and CPGvision at $4.7M in pipeline with 533% SEO growth.

Where they beat SERPsculpt: Breadth. Kalungi will build your entire marketing function including brand, paid, RevOps, and web. We do organic growth only.

Kalungi pricing

Kalungi does not publish pricing on its own website. Third-party sources report full-service engagements starting around $45,000 per month and CMO coaching from around $6,500 per month, with a minimum initial commitment before moving to month-to-month. Their Clutch profile lists a $25,000+ minimum project. Treat these as directional and confirm on a call.

4. Lean Labs: best for HubSpot-native SaaS from Seed to Series C

Best for: B2B SaaS companies running on HubSpot that need the platform to actually convert, and that want AI-assisted content production with human quality control.

Not for: Companies not on HubSpot, or companies wanting the cheapest templated vendor. Lean Labs says so directly on their own site.

Lean Labs is a Diamond-tier HubSpot Solutions Partner working with B2B SaaS startups and scaleups from Seed through Series C. Their positioning has shifted significantly in 2026 toward what they call Loop Marketing, built on an in-house agentic system named Factor8, alongside AEO work aimed at getting brands cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI answers.

Their published description of the quality process is worth noting because it is unusually specific: a context engine learns the business, agents handle repetitive execution like drafts, schema, and reviews, and a human scores every output on a green, yellow, or red system. Yellow and red scores require a comment that notifies the team.

Clients include Virtu, LRN, EZ Texting, Qualio, and HubSpot itself. They work with no long-term contracts.

Where they beat SERPsculpt: HubSpot depth. If your growth problem is really a HubSpot problem, they will solve it faster than we will.

Lean Labs pricing

Their pricing page states programs starting at $15,000 per month. Elsewhere on their site they publish HubSpot projects, migrations, and integrations at $1,000 to $5,000, and Loop Marketing plus Growth-Driven Design at around $5,000 per month. They also offer performance-based engagements.

5. Gripped: best for UK and EU B2B SaaS

Best for: UK-based or EU-selling B2B SaaS and AI companies between £2M and £50M ARR that want demand generation, paid media, SEO, and GEO run as one coordinated system.

Not for: US-only companies, or teams that want a single channel handled cheaply. Their model assumes multi-channel scope.

Gripped is a London agency founded in 2017, working exclusively with SaaS, AI, and tech companies. They report 160+ clients and roughly 25 staff, operating from Southwark Street in SE1. Founders Steve Eveleigh and Ben Crouch have been in B2B SaaS since 2004. Clients include Ideagen, Epicor, Ravelin, Crownpeak, Searchlight Cyber, and Duetto.

For Crownpeak they report £1.3M in new pipeline in a single quarter from integrated paid search and social, plus a 108% year-over-year increase in sales opportunities.

They run 30-day sprints against 90-day objectives, and they now offer GEO as a named service with a dedicated page written for LLM consumption.

One consistent criticism in third-party directory reviews is content depth, with some clients noting that blog articles could go further on the subject matter.

Where they beat SERPsculpt: UK and EU market knowledge, and paid media. If your buyers are in EMEA, local expertise is worth real money.

Gripped pricing

Gripped publishes full pricing, which is rare in this category and worth crediting. From their pricing page:

• Advisory or Execution: from £3,500/month plus project fees
• Performance: from £7,500/month
• Scale: from £15,000/month

They state a typical investment of £5,000 to £15,000 per month, with most marketing leaders investing £8,000 to £12,000 per month. Paid media budgets are separate and typically run £5,000 to £150,000+ per month. Website work is quoted separately at £18,000 to £45,000 for a basic refresh and £45,000 to £150,000+ for a full redesign. A one-time onboarding fee applies.

6. Foundation: best for Reddit, LLM visibility, and editorial content at scale

Best for: Established B2B brands and enterprise companies that want research-led content, Reddit strategy, and generative engine optimisation executed at scale.

Not for: Early-stage companies needing pipeline fast on a small budget. Foundation works with brands that already have traction.

Foundation was founded by Ross Simmonds nearly 12 years ago in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Their 2026 positioning centres on content strategy, SEO, and distribution, with Reddit strategy and execution, LLM visibility targeting, and brand sentiment work now named explicitly as services. Clients include Canva and Procore. They were named to the Clutch 100 for 2026 and the Culture 100 list of top 100 companies to work for in Canada.

Their distribution-first philosophy is the real differentiator. Most content agencies stop at publish. Foundation treats distribution as the harder half of the job.

Where they beat SERPsculpt: Reddit at brand scale and enterprise editorial standards. If you need Canva-tier content operations, they operate at that level.

Foundation pricing

Foundation does not publish pricing and does not list a minimum on a verified profile. Expect a custom quote.

How these agencies compare on fit

If your situation is	Start with
$50M+ ARR, budget for $31K/mo, need demand creation at scale	Refine Labs
Founder-led SaaS, revenue but no marketing team, need organic pipeline	SERPsculpt
Ads are the main channel and attribution is broken	ProperExpression
Nobody owns marketing strategy internally	Kalungi
HubSpot is the centre of your stack and it is underperforming	Lean Labs
UK or EU buyers, multi-channel scope	Gripped
Established brand, need Reddit and LLM visibility at scale	Foundation

FAQ

Why did Chris Walker leave Refine Labs?

Refine Labs announced in July 2025 that Walker stepped away to focus on new ventures, with CEO Megan Bowen becoming majority owner and Grandin Holdings investing. Walker had already founded a separate company, Passetto. Refine Labs states he is no longer involved in day-to-day operations.

Is Refine Labs still worth it in 2026?

For companies that match their stated ICP of $50M+ ARR mid-market and enterprise B2B SaaS, yes. Their methodology is documented, their client results are published, and their team is experienced. The question is fit rather than quality. At a published $31,000 per month starting price for full-service management, the maths only works above a certain revenue threshold.

What does Refine Labs cost?

Refine Labs publishes three options on their pricing page: a Marketing Strategy and Digital Media Assessment project at $35,000 for 6 to 8 weeks, Full-Service Management from $31,000 per month, and Paid Media and Creative Strategy from $20,000 per month.

Which Refine Labs alternative is cheapest?

Lean Labs publishes the lowest entry point at $2,000 per month, though that tier is scoped for HubSpot projects rather than full growth programs. For a complete organic growth program, SERPsculpt’s Platinum tier at $7,426 per month is the lowest published full-service price on this list.

Which alternative is best for organic search and AI visibility?

SERPsculpt, Gripped, and Foundation all name AI answer visibility as a core service. SERPsculpt and Gripped both publish pricing. Foundation operates at enterprise scale with Reddit and LLM visibility as named specialties.

Do I need a demand generation agency or an SEO agency?

Demand generation agencies create awareness among people who are not yet looking, usually through paid social and content distribution, and results typically show over 6 to 12 months. Organic search agencies capture people who are already looking, which produces faster revenue signal but a lower ceiling on total reach. Most companies below $20M ARR get better returns starting with capture, then layering creation on top once the conversion path works.

Should content be optimised for AI answers as well as Google?

Yes. B2B buyers increasingly build vendor shortlists inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews before contacting anyone. Content that is structured for extraction gets cited in those answers. Content that is not structured for extraction is invisible in them, regardless of how well it ranks in traditional search results.

Choosing the right alternative

Refine Labs is a strong agency that moved upmarket. If you are at $50M+ ARR with budget to match, they remain a credible choice and this article is not an argument against them.

If you are a founder-led B2B SaaS company with real revenue and no internal marketing team, the honest answer is that you were never their ideal customer, and paying enterprise prices for an enterprise model is the expensive way to find that out.

SERPsculpt was built for the segment Refine Labs does not prioritise. Bottom-of-funnel content first, AI answer visibility as a core service rather than an upsell, and the two founders running your account personally.

Book a strategy call and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit, including when we are not.

Talk to Our Strategy Team