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…
Got tired of paying $100/mo for SEO tools, so I built an alternative launched on May 5, 2026 with 13 votes, #1,061 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
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 the SEO tool market. It provides essential SEO functionality and analysis capabilities for website optimization and search performance tracking. The tool targets budget-conscious users who want SEO insights without premium pricing.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
With Idiot Proof SEO, you can analyze any SERP and find instant weak spots, generate hundreds of low competition keywords, and track your keyword rankings over time.
Analyze any SERP and find instant weak spots , generate hundreds of low competition keywords for your website, and track your keyword rankings over time. Idiot Proof SEO makes finding long-tail and underserved keywords a breeze! Analyze or generate keywords for any niche and get real-time insights in seconds! Generate hundreds of automatically clustered and scored long-tail keyword ideas in seconds. Analyze the SERP for any keyword with highlighted weak spots and a ranking difficulty analysis. Monitor your website's ranking positions over time. Get daily, weekly, or monthly updates and track progress with email alerts. Get the SERP for any keyword in real-time , along with a detailed…from idiotproofseo.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
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SEO Stuff2023 · seo-stuff.com · ▲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!
OverleadFeb 2026 · overlead.co · ▲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…
- RMReleasing my own SEO tools, free of charge2018 · ▲17
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…
SEOZast2025 · seozast.com · ▲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…
Jello SEO2025 · jelloseo.com · ▲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…
- IMI made an SEO checker to fix frustrating issues in minutes, not hours2024 · seototal.xyz · ▲23
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…
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wallhop is a free paywall bypass. Paste any article link to read it without paywall popups, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension. A simple 12ft.io alternative.
Growth · 13d ago · wallhop.io
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, May 2026
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Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
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Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
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🌱 Private, quiet space for thinking. Simple app for .md files. - zakirullin/files.md
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