ASO agency Austria: a software company in Graz and the agency that sells its seats.

Austria is a small, wealthy, German-speaking market with a good startup scene and exactly one internationally relevant ASO company. App Radar was founded in Graz in 2015 by Thomas Kriebernegg and Christian Janesch as software: keyword tracking, visibility scores, automated suggestions. It grew, acquired the Spanish tool TheTool, added managed services, and in November 2023 was itself acquired by SplitMetrics, a US-registered software group. It still operates under its own brand with its own agency arm. If you search for an ASO agency in Austria, that agency arm is what you find, and its economics are unlike a normal agency’s.

When a software company runs an agency, the agency is a channel. Every managed client is a subscription seat that does not churn, a case study for the product, and a lead for the upsell to a bigger tier. The service itself does not need to be highly profitable; it needs to keep the client inside the platform. That is why tool-owned agencies are often reasonably priced and why they always run the work through their own dashboard. You are not just hiring people. You are being onboarded, and since 2023 the onboarding serves a larger group with two agency arms and its own margin targets.

Tool-led work has a specific drift. It thinks in the tool’s categories: keyword tracking, visibility scores, ranking history, automated suggestions. Those are useful inputs. They are not judgment. The decision about what claim your first screenshot should make, or which three terms belong in your title, or whether your listing is fine and your product is the problem, does not come from a dashboard. Tool-led work drifts toward what the tool can measure, which is rankings, and away from what you want, which is installs.

The second Austrian pattern is the Vienna digital agency. Vienna has excellent SEO, performance and brand agencies serving Austrian and German clients, and most have an ‘App Store Optimierung’ page staffed from the SEO team. The instincts are Google’s: content, keywords, visibility reports. The store has no backlinks and barely reads descriptions.

The third is the German overflow. Austrian apps aiming at scale hire Berlin, and Berlin brings frameworks on a consulting cadence. Read the Germany page for what that costs.

Against that: one consultant who does not own a tool and does not want to sell you one. I use whatever data source fits your category and hand your team a cheap subscription they can run themselves when we finish. A teardown of your listing in the German-speaking storefronts and beyond. A rewrite. One screenshot test. A handover with dates. The fee is fixed, it ends, and nothing in it is designed to keep you inside a platform.

To be fair to Austria: if you already use App Radar’s software, like it, and want the people who built it to run your account in it, the managed service is a coherent choice and the pricing reflects that it is a channel. If you want independent judgment on your listing and the freedom to use any tool afterward, a tool-owned agency is the wrong shape. Send me the proposal and I will show you what the work costs without the subscription attached.