How much does google search engine optimization cost? Getting told both

Nothing changed on Google's side, SEO itself has never cost anything to Google. You can't pay them to rank. What costs money is someone's time doing the work, or ads, which are a separate thing. So when people say both 'it's free' and 'it's expensive', both are sort of right. At a small scale you can do a lot of it yourself if you have the hours.