Hey man,
Yeah, I cannot, in good faith, argue with you and say that our fee for a successful review removal is by any means affordable for the average small business owner. However, I can certainly attest to the fact that we have had quite a number of clientele purchase our service, with a small percentage of those clients going as far ordering the removals of 20-30 negative reviews from their listing (albeit at a slightly discounted rate). Our reasoning for pricing the service as such can be summed up by the following:
We're a US-based ORM agency so obviously, our costs for labor and everything else is going to be much higher than an ORM agency or provider based out of a developing nation. On top of that, giving a 7 day removal guarantee is a very difficult time frame to render the service within consistently. Most ORM providers are incapable of consistently meeting this deadline so they price their service at rates that are more reasonable for businesses that are prepared to wait a little while and can weather the storm that a negative or defamatory review can have for a month or two.
We're also not really fooling ourselves into thinking that everyone with a GMB listing and some negative reviews is going to be our client. There's almost no shot that some mom-and-pop cafe is going to be purchasing our review removal service. The clients that primarily purchase our services are plastic surgeons, marketing agencies, private schools, dentists, a doggy-day-care-center (surprisingly lol), and other higher-ticket businesses.
We've recently had a client that was a private school come to us that had a crazy, helicopter-parent Karen accuse their teachers of physically abusing their teenage son. When you are a reputable business and you are faced with the prospect of having serious legal action taken against you and a potentially massive PR crisis, all because some mentally unstable customer decided to broadcast their defamatory statetements online, you really would not think twice about spending a couple of grand on a premium removal service.
Sure, as the commenter above me had mentioned, you can attempt to build your infrastructure for manual reporting, attempt to bribe the reviewer to take down the review but that could take weeks to materialize, with no real guarantee that your endeavours will even be successful at the end of it. As you already had a look at our sales thread, you probably already saw that iMod stated we removed the Local Guide review within 3 days as opposed to the seven that we advertise. That's because seven days is basically our absolute max delivery deadline which is why we're comfortable calling ourselves a premium service provider and why clients that find themselves in scenarios similar to the one I've outlined above are happy to pay a premium price for it.
Hope that gave you some insight into our pricing policies!