I tend to try and do it myself as much as possible to keep costs down. Spending significant ammounts on SEO to me seems risky, since no SEO firm can guarantee you any kind of results.
I have not spend single cent till yet but yes i have spent my hundred of hours by reading seo articles tips and tricks . Than i keep them trying on my blog .
I've spent a big ZERO .. Why to pay for things if you can do them by yourself ? SEO is not a science - it's all about testing !
Same here, I think we should do the SEO stuffs by ourselves, rather than just paying others to deal with it!