Do not buy a subscription yet. Marathon already pays for the data feed that every grid tool resells, and a real 7 by 7 scan now costs 10 cents and 30 seconds. Run 5 prospect grids by hand this week for under a dollar, put them in front of real prospects, and only build the Signal module once a grid report is actually winning work.
Is a grid heatmap a sales tool Marathon uses to win retainers, or a priced line item clients buy? That answer decides whether this gets built into Signal's prospect flow or into a rate card, and nothing else can be scoped until it is settled.
Most of this is not a new project. Checked live today, not recalled.
| Piece | Status | What that means for this plan |
|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO account | Built | Live and funded: $48.90 balance, $51 spent to date, under jacob@marathoncreative.co. Signal already calls it for local competitor discovery. The Maps, Local Finder and local pack endpoints sit on the same account, so there is no new contract and no new vendor. |
| Grid scan script | Built today | Written and run against a real client. 49 points, 29.9 seconds, $0.098. Proof is in the next section. |
| Heatmap rendering | Does not exist | The only genuinely missing piece, and it is small. Mapbox account marathon1 is already Marathon's standard map tool. Caveat: no payment method on file as of 6 Oct, so the default token shows usage limited. The map below uses open tiles instead to avoid that. |
| Storage and history | Partial | Signal is Pages plus D1 and now has real Cloudflare Access in front of it, so the admin API no longer answers in the open. No grid tables yet. Two new tables, both append only. |
| Client roster | Partial | 9 clients in Signal. Marathon Creative is the only Active one. The other 8 are one account stubs behind the research gate, so nothing scrapes for them today. |
| Priced service line | Does not exist | Local SEO and map pack work appear on no Marathon rate card. If clients are meant to buy this, the rate card comes first and the tool second. |
Real scan, run today, not a mockup. Keyword siding contractor, 7 by 7 grid, 5 mile radius, centred on 5750 Bintliff Dr. Matched by Google cid, never by name.
North is up. Tap any square for the top 3 at that point.
Allstate is the number one siding result across a roughly 3 mile core and is absent from the top 76 at the corners of a 5 mile box. Checked deliberately at depth 100, so this is real absence, not a shallow pull. Three quarters of their own service area never sees them. That is a single picture a contractor understands in two seconds, and it is the pitch.
The DataForSEO figure below is measured from today's calls, not quoted from a pricing page. Every competitor number is from their own public pricing, checked today.
| Option | Per 1,000 grid points | Credits expire | White label from |
|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO (what Marathon already has) | $2.00 measured | Never, pay as you go | No reports at all, you build them |
| Local Falcon Starter, $24.99/mo | $3.33 | End of every month | $199.99 Premium only |
| Local Falcon Premium, $199.99/mo | $3.17 | End of every month | Included |
| BrightLocal Track, $41/mo per location | 5 grid keywords included, add on prices unpublished | No credits | $41, every plan |
| Local Viking / Local Optics, $39/mo | Per listing plus credits | Geogrid credits roll over | $99 Pro |
| Scenario | Points / month | DataForSEO | Cheapest tool plan | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 prospect grids, one keyword each, one off | 245 | $0.49 | $24.99 Starter | $24.50 |
| 9 Signal clients, 5 keywords, weekly | 9,481 | $18.96 | $49.99 Basic | $31.03 |
| 30 clients, 10 keywords, weekly, white labelled | 63,210 | $126.42 | $199.99 Premium | $73.57 |
Read the right hand column honestly. At full scale a build saves about $74 a month. Cost alone does not justify writing software. The arguments that do are ownership of the deliverable, the grid living inside Signal's existing prospect doc rather than a vendor PDF, and not paying $199.99 purely to remove another company's logo.
Approve or flag each piece. Estimates assume it lands in Signal, reusing its Pages, D1 and Access setup.
Pick a chip, or type your own. Leaving one blank is fine, I will come back and ask rather than assume.