Alternatives
Products that do what I built a keyword research tool without a monthly subscription does
Hi 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!
- 1RM
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
- 2IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 3IM
Hey HN, I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last three startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience. SEO always seemed like the answer, but I didn’t know where to start. It felt overwhelming—so many technical terms like keyword research, clustering, SERP, semantics, topical authority… I could go on. That’s where my idea for my next startup came from: building an all-in-one SEO tool that’s easy to use and understand. The complexity of SEO is hidden behind a simple UI, and the only thing users need to do…
2025 · babylovegrowth.ai
- 4IB
Do you want to monetize a private group/ channel/ community? Use Subjoin to create a personal membership page in minutes. It's easy to use and free to try out. No need to integrate Stripe if membership is free. - - - - I have never built something this fast, what a thrill! I saw there was no easy way to create a simple subscription page. Big platforms are confusing and expensive for simple needs. - - - - What are you building? Would love to connect with like-minded people on X: @tjmakingof
2024 · subjoin.me
- 5C6
Hey there, I'm a solo dev behind KewlTools. So I'm one of those people who like to build their own tools/utilities whenever they a) want to get something done, or b) want to learn something. c) don't want to spend ages finding a utilty and going through walls of ads. I gradually built 66 tools, all free, fast, ad-free, and zero login. I (and my family/friends) use these daily, so thought some of you will find it useful! Any suggestions, improving current tools or adding new ones, please let me know.
2025 · kewltools.com
- 6KY
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
- 7IM
AI search results are quickly becoming more important than SEO, but as businesses, we have no visibility over it! That's why I'm building "Ahrefs for AI search results". Track keyword performance on AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity & more
2025 · linrush.com
- 8IB
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
- 9IB
Hey HN, I've just begun my solopreneur journey. I've been a "serial starter" - often starting projects and never seeing them through, and I have finally finished my first project! Maybe this sentiment resonants with some of you, let me know in the comments below I built this tool as a simple no-risk method for turning more visitors into customers by A/B testing your sale promotions and automatically displaying the promotion with the highest conversion rate. Did you know that increasing your conversion rate by just half a percent can have a dramatic impact on your sales without needing…
2024 · smartsalebanner.com
- 10IB
I've been frustrated by so many blogging platforms. Last I used Ghost. I thought it was expensive and I hated that www I had to prefix on custom domain. So, I built https://lykhari.com just for myself and then opened for public. If you want something simple do try. It became profitable and hence self sustaining!
2025 · lykhari.com
- 11AE
Hey folks, Elias here. Excited to unveil my latest project. Why I Built This: Traditional keyword search isn't cutting it. I've used LLM-embeddings to provide more nuanced, relevant results. How It Works: LLM-embedding similarity on curated datasets for semantically similar results. No need to iterate over keywords any more. Current Datasets: - YC Companies - Show HN Posts, - Ask HN Posts - ProductHunt Startups - Github Top 200k Repos Use Cases: - Validate a product idea's existence - Check if someone already Asked HN something - Have fun - search random terms and see what pops up Want to…
2023 · payperrun.com
- 12IB
So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling? The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity? I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly. It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it…
Dec 2025 · firstclick.so
- 13IB
Hey HN! I’ve created (co-created with my co-founder) a tool called demoshake that helps you build interactive demos and use them in your sales process. The idea is simple - you create as many demos as you want, group them and let your sales team use them in their demos calls. You can embed demos in your landing page (iframe style) too. I welcome any criticism and suggestions! Harun
2024 · demoshake.com
- 14WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 15IB
I built a minimal opensource CMS, I use it myself for my blog and for other SaaS. l love blogging, and sometimes I post random thoughts on my blog. The only thing is, I always did it with .md files, which is fine too However, I was excited about the idea of using a CMS that was very minimal and avoiding the option of connecting something like WordPress or other big platforms. Open source (if you want to fork it or contribute) and free to use (unless I see you have a million views haha). Star the repo if you like it!
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 16IM
Hi hn! It has always annoyed me that recipe websites are so cluttered and have so much (in my opinion) useless fluff, so I made a little website to solve that problem! One good thing about SEO for once is that Google has pretty much forced the internet to adopt JSON-LD for recipes so many recipes are directly extractable and for others I have several fall back parsers including an indieweb parser :) If you do find a website that is broken feel free to click the flag button or share it as I would love to fix any edge cases
Apr 2026 · tangled.org
- 17WS
Hi HN, We are building a search engine to help founders, investors, and early adopters to easily discover startups from all over the world. Discovering startups - whether it is a potential competitor, to validate an idea or as part of a DD process - is a difficult and time-consuming process. We believe that many existing platforms require expensive subscriptions and general-purpose search engines often do not give a complete enough picture. To solve this problem, we are releasing a free-to-use search engine (with a relatively generous daily limit on search volume). No sign-up is required. We…
2023 · symonda.com
- 18IM
Hi there! I made a project for pure joy called Indieseas.net. I made it because I disliked how search engines completely ignore smaller websites, prioritizing ads and businesses. That said, I decided to make my very own search engine! But, how could I keep business websites outside the system? The solution were 88x31 buttons. These are images or gifs that were used back in the days to connect websites between eachother. This was useful because search engines weren't very bad in the times. Thankfully, people still use them a lot nowadays! So, I whipped up a program in Typescript using Bun…
2025 · indieseas.net
- 19TT
I built a simple tool that suggests good domain names based on your idea, something I usually spend way too long on myself. It's free, no sign-up needed, 5 searches / day (a bit wonky, working on that part). Mainly built it for myself but would love some feedback and tips for improvement! :) Thanks!
2025 · helpmefindagooddomainnameformyidea.com
- 20IM
orignally shared this on startup school... i thought id' share it here. i'm using a `nocode communication tool` (a web-based interface... a single browser tab!) for all of these things: 1. landing page — the landing page is the product and i wanted for folks to feel "transported" right into the app without having to walk through a shitty b2b marketing-style content. this is akin to my experience back in the `BBS` days of the mid-90's where you were immediately into the app, community, and tool. no terms of service, no privacy policy. just pure, immediate value. 2. building community — we…
2021
- 21IM
I build a lot of small products myself and I realized how many indie founders want an exit that doesn’t involve platforms charging large commissions or requiring big revenue numbers. Sometimes a project makes $50/month, sometimes $500, sometimes $0 but has a great codebase, and that’s enough value for someone else. So I built buy-startups.com, a very simple, privacy-friendly marketplace for buying and selling small online startups. It’s not fancy. There’s no commission, no listing fee, no hidden funnel. Just a straightforward way for indie devs and bootstrappers to list a project and…
Dec 2025 · buy-startups.com
- 22

I built 30+ free tools so you don't have to pay $50/month 💀
Jul 2026 · toolshuball.blogspot.com
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