The objection, answered
You are looking at a fraction of what you pay now, so you are looking for the catch. There is no catch. There is a different business model, and this page is all of it, including the parts that cost you.
The first reason
That is the tax. Win a client with eight locations and your own software bill goes up eight times before you have done a minute of work for them.
| Vendor | What they charge | 25 locations |
|---|---|---|
| BrightLocal | $39–59 per location / mo | $975 – $1,475 / mo |
| Semrush Local | $30–60 per location / mo | $750 – $1,500 / mo |
| Local Falcon | credit-based grid scans | $25 – $200 / mo on top |
| AgencyAnalytics | $25/mo + $41.67 per 500 keywords | $150 – $400 / mo on top |
| Whatagraph | $229 – $463 / mo flat | $229 – $463 / mo |
Run the rows an agency actually runs together and a mid-sized local agency is spending $1,000–2,000 a month on this stack today. None of that is bad software. It is per-location software, and per-location pricing charges you for winning.
Why the tax exists
Every location you add is a location on their servers: their storage, their data contracts, their bill. It costs them real money to serve, every month, for as long as you keep it there. Charging per location is them passing on a cost they genuinely carry.
You download an installer and it runs on your own machine, against your own API keys. When you add a location, nothing happens on any server of ours, because there is no server of ours in the loop. Charging you for it would be inventing a tax we do not pay ourselves.
The second reason
Every RAWDOG app runs on your own Claude plan and your own API keys, for every external service it touches.
There is no key of ours that your work runs on. If we went dark tomorrow, the keys in your settings screen would still be yours and would still work.
Each app has a settings screen that takes your keys. They are stored locally on your own machine — never sent to our servers, never in our database.
Each key is validated with a real call, so a field cannot quietly accept something that does not work and leave you to find out later.
When a key is missing, wrong or out of quota, the app names the key that failed and what to do about it. It does not degrade quietly and hand you a thinner report with no explanation.
First run walks you through adding them, because the app does nothing at all until they are in.
You now have your own API bill. Realistically $100–300 a month depending on how much you run. That money goes to those vendors, not to us, and it is not included in our price. It is a real cost and we are not going to pretend it is not there.
You have to get your keys in before the software does anything. If you have never created an API key before, that is the hardest part of owning this product, and it happens before you have got a single thing out of it.
That trade is the whole deal. What it buys is the next section.
What unlimited means here
Unlimited clients. Unlimited locations. Unlimited scans. There is no usage counter, no credit balance and no scan limit anywhere in the product.
Not a fair-use policy. Not a soft cap that someone reviews when you get noisy. Not "unlimited" with a footnote further down that redefines it. Not a plan that gets throttled once you become a heavy user. None of those exist here, because none of them have anything to measure.
Your scans run on your keys, on your machine. A customer with four clients and a customer with four hundred cost us exactly the same, which is nothing. A limit would be a number we invented in order to charge you for passing it.
Two things are limited. Here they both are.
Solo is one, Agency is five. That is the only line in our pricing that grows, and it grows with your headcount rather than with your client list.
You will run out of it eventually, because you bought a finite amount of it. That limit is yours: you set it, you raise it, you pay it, and you can read it on the vendor's own dashboard. We cannot raise it for you and we cannot bill you for it.
That is the whole list. If you find a third limit inside the product, it is a bug.
The other side of it
A page that only lists advantages is the thing this company exists to be the opposite of. So here is the rest of it, at the same weight.
You install it. You cannot open it from a hotel laptop or a phone the way you can open a hosted dashboard, and if your machine is off then nothing is running.
The licence binds to a machine. Moving to a new computer is a real step rather than a login, and seats are how a second person gets in.
Your own vendor accounts, your own keys, and an API invoice each month that is yours to read and yours to question. Nobody sets that up for you.
Run a heavy week of grid scans and the cost lands on your card, not on a vendor who priced it in. There is no vendor in the loop to absorb it — which is the same fact that makes unlimited possible, read from the other end.
The short version
That is the entire difference. It is not a launch price, it is not somebody else's money buying market share, and it is not a worse product sold cheaper. It is a hosted business model against an installed one, and the installed one has almost no marginal cost to pass on.
Two things stay true because of it: the price does not move when you win clients, and there is no counter anywhere in the product.
Reports is the only one of the three close to shipping. Sites and Stacks are two planning documents with no code yet. The store is not open.