Semrush’s own pages disagree about whether the tax is already in the price

Semrush collects and remits US sales tax itself, with nexus established through offices in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Texas, across twenty-four jurisdictions at rates from one percent in Connecticut up to fifteen percent in Chicago. Its Terms of Service state the price is exclusive of tax, while its own FAQ states tax is already included — two pages, two answers, neither one retracted.

Keysearch names its payment processor, not its tax policy

Keysearch LLC, based in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, publishes no tax policy page anywhere, and no state, calculation basis, or nexus statement accompanies its billing pages. The only names given are its payment processors, Stripe, PayPal, or Braintree — a detail about how the money moves, not about who owes tax on it.

One vendor’s own terms disagree about where the servers even sit

Keysearch’s own pages contradict each other on hosting: its Terms describe processing “in the US and elsewhere” at the vendor’s own discretion, while its Privacy Policy states the US alone. No region, host, or certification — SOC 2, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, GovCloud, or a HIPAA business associate agreement — is named on either page. Semrush states its data sits in the US, on AWS and GCP, with no region named either, and its only certification of its own is PCI DSS Level 1, its subprocessor list separately naming the US and Ireland.

A purchase order doesn’t exist at either vendor, just for different reasons

Keysearch runs entirely on self-service card or PayPal, refundable within thirty days, with two days’ notice required to cancel; no invoice, purchase order, net-30 term, ACH, or W-9 exists, and there is no enterprise tier to route a sales conversation through at all. Semrush keeps self-service to card only, opens check or wire to annual subscriptions at a threshold defined merely as “depends on account value,” and reserves an actual invoice for a signed Order carrying one and a half percent monthly late interest.

Rank tracking checks in monthly at one vendor, daily at the other

Keysearch tracks eighty keywords a month at its entry tier, two hundred at its upper one, with the checking frequency, search engines, and locations left unpublished. Semrush tracks daily, down to the ZIP code, across Google, Bing, and Baidu, with desktop, mobile, and tablet results kept separate.

The entry price gap runs far wider than either vendor’s tax policy

Keysearch costs twenty-four US dollars a month, or two hundred forty a year: two hundred daily searches, eighty tracked keywords, two thousand audited pages. Semrush costs a hundred thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents a month on its Pro tier, or one thousand four hundred eight dollars the first year billed annually, for five tracked websites and five hundred keywords.