Surfer lists four tax regimes, and the United States isn’t one of them

Surfer’s merchant of record is Surfer Sp. z o.o., based in Poland, with Stripe reduced to a technical processor rather than a seller. Its help center names four tax regimes it does handle, Poland, the EU, the UK, and India — the United States falls under none of them, and no US sales tax is announced anywhere on its pages.

Semrush collects the tax, then argues with itself over whether it’s 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 own Terms of Service state the price is exclusive of tax, while its FAQ states tax is already included, with neither version withdrawn.

Neither vendor names a region, and neither holds a certification of its own

Surfer hosts on Google Cloud, with location stated only as “EU / United States” and no specific region named; FedRAMP, StateRAMP, GovCloud, a business associate agreement, and SOC 2 are all absent. Semrush stores data in the US, on AWS and GCP, with no region named either, and its only certification of its own is PCI DSS Level 1, with the rest belonging to its hosts; its own subprocessor list separately names the US and Ireland.

Neither vendor’s invoice route resembles the other’s

Surfer offers no invoice option at all: only card, monthly or annual, and wire on an annual plan solely on request to Support, PayPal excluded; below its Enterprise tier, nine hundred ninety-nine US dollars a month and custom-quoted, card is the only path, with no purchase order, net-30, ACH, or W-9. 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.

One rank tracker runs at midnight UTC, the other runs down to the ZIP code

Surfer’s rank tracking is a separately billed add-on, checking daily at midnight UTC, country-level targeting only, Google alone, desktop or mobile per project. Semrush tracks daily too, but down to the ZIP code, across Google, Bing, and Baidu, with desktop, mobile, and tablet results kept separate.

The entry price gap runs wider than the tax gap

Surfer’s Discovery tier costs forty-nine US dollars a month billed annually: a hundred twenty documents, ten tracked pages, and a single seat. Semrush’s Pro tier costs a hundred thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents a month, or one thousand four hundred eight dollars the first year billed annually, for five tracked sites and five hundred keywords.