How I built an Ahrefs alternative on open APIs without burning my budget

Louis — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:44:24 +0000

I've been building budgetSEO, a rank tracking and keyword research tool aimed at small sites and solo founders who find Ahrefs overkill. The pitch is simple: Ahrefs Lite starts at $129/mo billed monthly, and most of us just want to know where our keywords rank and how they move. So I set out to build something cheaper that still gives exact answers.

The data pipeline is the part I'm most proud of, and also the part that gave me the most headaches. Rankings come from live Google results via DataForSEO. For each tracked keyword I store the country, language and device, because a position on mobile in France is a different number from desktop in the US. Each check returns the exact organic position in the top 100, and I write that to a history table so you can see the curve over time. Estimated monthly visits are derived from the keywords you track and their search volume, which is an estimate, not a promise, and I try to say so in the UI.

What was hard? Scheduling and cost. Free users get manual checks only, paid Starter gets automatic weekly updates, and Pro rechecks up to 100 ranking keywords daily. Getting the queue to respect plan limits without double-charging API calls took several rewrites. I also spent a while on rank change alerts so an email digest only fires on meaningful moves instead of noise.

BudgetSEO does not do site audits, content editing, PPC research or link building, and I'd rather say that up front than pretend. If you want a cheap, honest rank tracker, take a look at https://budgetseo.ai. I'm happy to hear what data pipeline problems you've solved differently.

DEV Community: Louis

How I built an Ahrefs alternative on open APIs without burning my budget