$1,000 to $3,000 a month: the real proposal we sent a healthcare certification school

The client runs an online certification school that trains licensed healthcare providers, doctors, nurse practitioners, chiropractors, nutritionists, and several other regulated professions, in functional and nutritional medicine. Students complete a program of course modules over roughly a year and pay for it either as a full tuition amount or through a payment plan. The school is based in the Portland, Oregon suburbs and sells entirely online.

This kind of continuing-education business depends on two very different audiences finding it: prospective students searching for a credentialing program, and existing graduates who need to be found by patients later. Both journeys start with a search engine or, increasingly, an AI answer engine, which is why the proposal leaned hard on visibility rather than on a single funnel.

Before pricing anything, the agency crawled the school's public site and ran a mobile performance test. The homepage took about 44 seconds to become visible on a throttled mobile connection, driven mostly by page weight rather than server speed. Every one of the roughly 50 pages checked was missing a meta description, and the page titles were unedited system defaults rather than search-facing titles.

The more serious finding was security, not marketing. Thirteen of the pages crawled contained hidden text blocks, positioned off-screen with CSS so a visitor would never see them, that linked out to unrelated gambling sites. That kind of injected content sits on some of the site's highest-value pages, including its enrollment checkout flow, which made it both a search-engine risk and a trust risk the moment it was described plainly to the client.

The scope bundled seven things into one monthly fee: AI search optimization aimed at getting the school named directly inside AI chat answers, ongoing SEO, email marketing to the school's existing list, Google Ads management, full analytics so the client could see which channel produced a paying student, ongoing website maintenance, and content management. A full brand and website rebuild was included as the anchor deliverable, built and shown to the client as a working sample before any commitment.

The rebuilt sample intentionally excluded every price the audit had found conflicting across the client's own checkout funnels. Multiple live checkout paths quoted different totals for the same program, so the sample listed no specific tuition number at all and instead pointed prospective students toward a call, where the real current number could be given without repeating a contradiction that was already live on the client's own site.

The number that went out was a straight time-based ramp, USD $1,000 in the first month, $2,000 in the second, and $3,000 a month from the third month onward, with no ceiling above that. That structure replaced an earlier internal idea that would have tied the fee to how many new students enrolled in a given month, counted in bands.

The enrollment-based version was scrapped before it ever reached the client. The simpler time-based ramp was chosen instead because it gave the client a predictable number to plan around from day one, rather than a fee that could swing depending on a metric the client would have had to report honestly every month for the agency to bill correctly.

Three things were deliberately kept off the sample site and out of the pitch. First, no continuing-education credit claim was reproduced, because those claims on the client's own site came from small private accrediting bodies rather than a recognized regulator, and repeating them without that context would have overstated what they mean. Second, none of the hidden spam content was reproduced anywhere, obviously, but it also was not used as a scare tactic beyond stating plainly what had been found and when.

Third, no specific tuition figure was invented for the sample pages, for the reason above: the client's own site showed at least three different prices for its flagship program depending on which checkout path a visitor landed on, and inventing a fourth number would have added to the confusion rather than fixing it.

The proposal was sent to the client in September 2026 after an internal review. The dossier behind this page records the send, along with a note that the security finding was serious enough to be worth a phone call in addition to the written proposal, given how much money moves through a checkout flow that was, at the time, carrying hidden malicious content.

Nothing in the surviving record says how the client responded afterward. What can be said with confidence is the date the proposal went out, the price attached to it, and the security concern that came bundled with it.