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When does a free SEO tool stop being enough?

Published · Editor: Kaz (pen name)

Summary

It stops being enough when you need more volume or want to look at sites you don't own. Free plans cap you at your own verified sites on Ahrefs, 10 tracked keywords on Semrush, and 500 URLs per crawl on Screaming Frog. The cheapest way past each limit ranges from $29 a month to $279 a year, depending on which one you hit.

You want to see what competitors are doing

Ahrefs Free works on as many sites as you can verify as yours, and on nothing else. The $29 Starter plan is the first step that lets you add a site you don't own, but only one, and it comes with tight edges: 250 rows per report, no exports, and one month of history.

That's fine for keeping an eye on a single rival. If you're comparing several competitors every month and pulling the numbers into a report, Lite at $129 is where it starts to work, with five unverified projects, 2,500 rows per report, 500,000 export rows a month and six months of history.

Ten keywords run out fast

Semrush's free plan tracks 10 keywords. A site with a few product lines fills that quickly. The paid options sit in different places:

  • Ahrefs Starter tracks 50 keywords and Lite tracks 750, all updated weekly.
  • Semrush SEO tracks 500 keywords daily for $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually.
  • SE Ranking Core tracks 2,000 keywords daily for $129 a month, or $103.20 billed annually.

If you only look at rankings once a week, the Ahrefs refresh schedule costs you nothing. If you check every morning, it rules Ahrefs out.

Your site passes 500 pages

The free Screaming Frog crawler stops at 500 URLs each run, so on an 800-page site it never sees 300 of them. It also can't save a crawl to reopen later, and JavaScript rendering plus the Search Console and Google Analytics integrations are licensed features. The license is $279 per user per year, about $23 a month, which makes crawl size the cheapest of these limits to lift over a full year.

Semrush's free site audit stops at 100 pages a month, so it won't help here. The site audit tools guide compares the options for larger sites.

Ways to test before you commit

You don't have to start with an annual plan. SE Ranking runs a 14-day trial with no credit card, covering up to 10 projects and 750 keywords tracked a day. Semrush has a seven-day free trial on its SEO, Starter and Pro+ plans. SpyFu advertises a 30-day money-back guarantee. Ahrefs Starter renews monthly only, so one month is the whole commitment.

Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.

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Sources

Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.