Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Got tired of paying $100/mo for SEO tools, so I built an alternative
Like many solo devs and indie hackers, I was paying $100+/mo for enterprise SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush) but only using about 5% of their features. I really just needed basic keyword research, SERP difficulty analysis, and simple rank tracking. I wanted to see what the actual floor was for raw SEO data if you stripped away the fluff and enterprise bloat. I spent the last few months wiring together different data sources to find out. I got my costs down to a few cents per report and because the data is so cheap to fetch on-demand, I packaged it into a minimalist tool which strictly…
Idiot Proof SEO is an alternative to expensive SEO tools designed for businesses and marketers seeking cost-effective optimization solutions. The product emerged from frustration with high monthly subscription fees in… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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SEO Stuff▲614Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2023 · seo-stuff.com · its alternatives →
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Optimise your website and get more traffic from Google.
2020 · ahrefs.com · its alternatives →
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I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →
- 4AS
Hey all, Last time when we were on HackerNews [1], we received a lot of feedback, and we incorporated most of it. - We have changed our name from grep.help to usegrasp.com - A privacy policy page - Bulk import - Pricing page We are happy to introduce a new feature: a personalized answer search engine that provides direct citations to the content on the page. Demo: https://usegrasp.com/search?q=is+starship+fully+reusable%3F 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35510949
2023 · usegrasp.com · its alternatives →
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Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 6FS
Hi HN! This started late last year as an afternoon project to play around with ElasticSearch, and then I kept thinking of new features I wanted to add. I still have a lot of things I want to build, but now seemed like a good time to put it out there: even if the results aren’t nearly the quality I’d like, I’ve still found it useful and I want to show it off! I’ve been working on it since September 2021, but only in fits and starts. The entire thing runs on a computer in my living room (there’s a picture on the About page); I haven’t done any load testing so we’ll see how it holds up.
2022 · search.feep.dev · its alternatives →
- 7RM
Hello HN! Being a software engineer and an SEO guy I wrote a heap of tools and scripts to make my life easier. Now I've decided to share some of them with the community, and made a small site where I will be publishing them. They are all completely free (yes, free forever) and you don't even need to sign up for the site. Just use the thing as you like, no limits. Currently you can access 4 instruments: - Backlink retriever - Thin/weak content analyzer - Traffic trend analysis - Visitor list retriever I am planning on releasing more free tools with time, and trying to stay original by…
2018 · its alternatives →
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SEOZast▲62After getting frustrated with expensive and clunky SEO tools, I decided to build my own. I made SEOzast — a tool that lets you generate 1000-word AI-written SEO articles with real backlinks from your site. It’s built for indie hackers, solo founders, and people launching niche projects who want organic traffic without spending $50/month or writing a single blog post. You enter your sites, SEOzast analyzes them to generate titles, descriptions, and topics. Then it handles the rest: from H1 tags to meta descriptions, internal linking from your real articles, and deployment to GitHub in…
2025 · seozast.com · its alternatives →
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Jello SEO▲11I was watching Deep Research do hours of research in minutes and thought why the hell am I still manually clicking through Ahrefs trying to guess what keywords to check? So I built an AI that does keyword research the same way. The problem with traditional keyword tools is they assume you already know what to look for. But I'd sit there thinking "okay I'm building a developer tool... do I search for 'API monitoring'? 'webhook debugging'? 'API testing'?" Then I'd spend an hour going down rabbit holes and miss the fact that "Postman alternative open source" or something like that gets 2k…
2025 · jelloseo.com · its alternatives →
- 10IM
If you have any issues optimizing your website. Seototal will help you. A while ago I was trying to improve my SEO on my first startup, That was when i realized how clunky and overcrowded most SEO tools were I used were, Ahrefs and Semrush initially. I built it to be lightweight and focus on the basics. It checks on page and technical issues to output straight forward reports with quick and helpful knowledge bases that will help you fix your SEO basics fast. The website is still in early stages and is actively being improved. So I'm open to any here any issues or feature recommendations you…
2024 · seototal.xyz · its alternatives →
- 11AE
My Raw Story on coming up with an idea, building and growing it. It's very detailed, with the purpose of giving another founder an insider look at one way of doing it. In January I launched an indexing tool called Index Rusher, that forces google to index your pages quicker, to get ranked for SEO faster. This whole project was something I needed myself since I got over 20 products and paying for an external one would simply cost too much. My initial idea was that I would just build an internal tool for my use, that has only 1 feature. No UI really, just 1 button. In the middle of the…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 12IT
After months of using Google Analytics I realized only about 50% of people accepted my cookie-popup. I had months of incorrect data for my website. I started looking for alternatives and eventually found Plausible, which is great (and open-source). Problem is, I didn't feel like paying 9$ a month to see the amount of visitors on a website i didn't even earn anything on, it was just a hobby project. Eventually I started making my own web analytics. Which actually isn't that hard. It took me about a month of working on my spare time every now and then. Being GDPR compliant basically means to…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 13IM
TLDR: I made a public only web analytics without signup. Stores views and visitors for 10 days before deleting data. Exactly 25 days ago today I posted here, proud of my new web analytics. The response was mixed and my post even got flagged (understandable). It was my first real launch and I actually made a sale just a day later of 49$(!). Back then my project was pay once, keep forever. Since then I have sadly went over to the dark side (subscription based). Anyways, I never went back to look at the post after the first two hours, turns out I got a lot of answers. Most answers was something…
2024 · indielytics.link · its alternatives →
- 14
Hey everyone, I wanted to see if I could build something like DataFa.st myself, so I made MochiAnalytics. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. It’s got all the bells and whistles a small team or solo founder would need to track campaigns and to see which channel is driving revenue. It’s a cheaper analytics tool for side projects, indie hackers, and small apps. I honestly wish I could make it free, but it still needs servers, a database, and a backend to keep event ingestion running 24/7, so there are real costs behind it. I’m still working on it and will keep adding more features…
Jul 2026 · mochianalytics.com · its alternatives →
- 15
With AI, it's faster than ever to ship a marketing site... but most of what gets generated is slop that was never built to be found. Plus the tools meant to catch that fall short: most SEO auditors cost money, don't play nicely with your agents, or tell you what's wrong without telling you how to actually rank for SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization: being cited by AI search like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews). crawlie fixes that! It's 100% free, it's local-first, it's agent-native (MCP baked in!), and every issue it finds comes with why it matters and how to fix it.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16IB
Hi HN, For the last 18 months, I've been working solo on building a completely independent search engine from scratch. Today, I'm opening it up for beta testing and would love to get your feedback. The project powers two public sites from the same 2-billion-page index: Searcha.Page: A session-aware search engine that uses a persistent browser key (not a cookie) for better context. Seek.Ninja: A 100% stateless, privacy-first version with no identifiers at all. The entire stack is self-hosted on a single ~$4k bare-metal EPYC server in my laundry room (no cloud, no VC funding). The search…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Professional SEO Tools, Ridiculously Cheap
Feb 2026 · seocheap.tools · its alternatives →
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Get instant recommendations to improve your content with FreshRank's content optimization tool. 100% Free to use.
Nov 2025 · freshrank.ai · its alternatives →
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Optiwing▲15I built a keyword grouping tool as a developer managing my own websites' SEO, I found most SEO suites too expensive with only subscription based models, with lots of unnecessary features for my needs. So I made a simple tool for myself that grew into it's own product. Optiwing has tools for Keyword discovery, grouping, content briefing and blogpost drafting with LLMs, SERP checking, and SERP comparison. What I did different: Pay-as-you-go pricing with no subscriptions. A simple integrated workflow from keyword research, to grouping, to content briefing/blog post writing. Large scale…
2024 · optiwing.com · its alternatives →
- 21
seofor.dev▲11Hi everyone! This is just me scratching my own itch, but since every time I build an app or a website I spend hours wondering how to make it not invisible to the world, I thought I'd build an SEO app that perfectly fits my needs. Most SEO tools are designed for agencies and copywriters, the usual pricing is simply too high for me, and there are just too many features that I don't need. I haven't found one that can crawl my local web server and that synergizes with my AI tools, so I made it myself. What I need is an app that tells me how to make my pages fully optimized, on what keywords to…
2025 · seofor.dev · its alternatives →
- 22IM
I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 23
I've built a little prototype a long while back, to help me keep track of visitors on my website. I didn't like google analytics for obvious privacy reasons, and I didn't like the existing self-hosted options because of how complicated they are. I always wanted a simple, basic tool, similar to plausible, but even simpler. So a few weeks ago I rebuilt my prototype into a reusable tool. And I made it open source. I built a website, a documentation, and I'd be excited for someone else to try it too. Who knows, maybe if enough people like the idea, I might even make it into a SaaS to save…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24KY
Hey HN I built a free AI SEO app called seoby.ai. I'm launching it on ProductHunt, Reddit and a few other places on Monday (19th February). It's 100% free, and has some pretty neat tools: 1. AI Content Detector: Find out if your content was written by a human or generated by AI. 2. AI Outline Generator: Remove writer's block and generate SEO-friendly outlines for your articles, blog posts, and landing pages. 3. AI SEO Topic Cluster Generator: Generate SEO-optimized topic clusters for your website and get better search engine visibility. I would love feedback/ideas/suggestions of…
2024 · seoby.ai · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →