PickASO review: the best kind of agency. Avoid the retainer anyway.

Let me be honest from the first line: PickASO is a good agency. Daniel Peris has been doing ASO since before most of the industry existed, he built a well-known tool before selling it, he writes and speaks with genuine knowledge, and the agency he runs with Miriam Peláez in Barcelona has stayed small and focused when it could have become a bloated full-service shop. If you are reading this expecting me to say they are a ripoff, I am not going to. What I am going to do is show you what remains of the case against hiring an agency when almost every usual criticism does not apply.

Here is what does not apply. There is no logo wall of accounts the founders never touched, because the founders are on the accounts. There is no proprietary platform to fund. There is no adtech parent, no award-driven marketing machine, no network margin. The team is small enough that the person on the sales call has a real chance of being the person on your listing. By the standards of this site, that is nearly a consultant already.

What remains is the model. PickASO, like every agency, sells monthly retainers, and a retainer does the same thing at a good agency as at a bad one: it bills the months in which the stores are quietly responding at the same rate as the months in which the work shipped. Even with excellent people, a subscription to ASO turns a series of decisive changes into a standing monthly service, because that is what the invoice needs. The fourth month at a good agency contains monitoring, a small tweak and a well-written report. It costs the same as the second month, which contained the rewrite.

There is also the small-team version of the capacity problem. A founder-led agency with a real client list has a finite number of founder hours. As the list grows, the founders move toward strategy and oversight and the day-to-day moves to a small team. That is a much better version of the agency problem than a hundred-person shop, but it is still the problem: the more clients, the further the person you hired is from your keyword field. And the regional focus, superb for Spanish and Latin American storefronts, is an edge you pay for whether or not your main markets are there.

Compare that with hiring one consultant who has made the same choices PickASO made, and then one more: no retainer. Fixed scope, fixed fee, an end date. A teardown, a rewrite, one creative test at a time, and a handover with dates. The person on the call is the person on every deliverable, because I take a fixed number of clients so that stays true. When it ends, your team owns the system, and the total is a fraction of a year of even a well-priced retainer.

In fairness, and I mean this more here than anywhere else on the site: if you want an agency, and especially if your markets include Spain or Latin America, PickASO is one of the few I would name without hesitation. If you want the work done once, properly, by the person you spoke to, and then handed over, the difference between us is the invoice model. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the same scope costs without the monthly.