Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / What SEO tools cost
How little can you spend on SEO tools and still get useful data?
Summary
For your own site, you can get a lot for nothing: Search Console, Ahrefs Free and the free version of Screaming Frog cover search performance, backlinks to verified sites and technical crawls of up to 500 URLs. Money starts to matter when you want to look at competitors or track a fixed keyword list over time. The cheapest ways in are Ahrefs Starter at $29 a month and SpyFu Basic at $39 a month ($29 on the annual plan), and the broad suites start at $129.
What $0 covers
Search Console shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for your site in Google Search. Ahrefs Free (formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) adds Site Explorer and Site Audit for sites you have verified, with 5,000 crawl credits per project each month. Credits are only used when the crawler hits an HTML page that returns a 200 status.
Screaming Frog's SEO Spider runs on your own computer and is free up to 500 URLs per crawl. A small blog or a local business site often fits inside that. The free version can't save crawls or render JavaScript, so you rerun the crawl each time, and pages that depend on JavaScript aren't rendered.
The $29 to $49 tier
This is where you can start looking at other people's sites.
- Ahrefs Starter, $29 a month. Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker, but with 200 credits a month, one unverified project, 50 tracked keywords and one month of history. It renews monthly only, and you can't add a second user.
- SpyFu Basic, $39 a month or $29 on the annual plan. 5,000 keyword rankings tracked weekly, one seat included and $15 for each extra seat. SpyFu offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Surfer Discovery, $49 a month billed yearly. A content tool, not a research one: 120 documents to create or optimize, 10 tracked pages, one seat.
Annual billing changes the first payment
Two of the cheap options are sold by the year. Screaming Frog's paid license is $279 per user per year. That works out to $23.25 a month, but you pay $279 up front and renew a year later; in return you lose the 500-URL cap and can save and schedule crawls. Surfer says the annual plan is charged for the entire year at purchase, so Discovery costs $588 on day one. Of the options above, only Ahrefs Starter and SpyFu's monthly plan are billed a month at a time.
Where the suites begin
Ahrefs Lite and SE Ranking Core are both $129 a month on monthly billing, and Semrush's SEO plan is $139 ($117.33 a month billed annually). SE Ranking Core, for example, tracks 2,000 keywords daily and includes a site audit of up to 250,000 pages a month. Stack Ahrefs Starter, SpyFu Basic and Surfer Discovery together and you are at about $117 a month, which is close to suite pricing with far lower limits. The all-in-one versus specialist guide runs that comparison with one and two users.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553?hl=en
- https://ahrefs.com/free
- https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/?wmc-currency=USD
- https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/9419051-about-ahrefs-starter-plan
- https://www.spyfu.com/pricing
- https://surferseo.com/pricing/
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://seranking.com/subscription.html
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
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.