You can start doing useful SEO work without an expensive subscription. Search Console can show whether people find your project. A free crawler can expose broken links. A small paid tool can make recurring research or monitoring easier.
The trick is choosing the tool for the problem you actually have. If your pricing page is missing from search, another keyword dashboard probably isn't your next purchase.
These seven affordable SEO tools give indie hackers a few practical options, from free diagnostics to paid monitoring. You don't need all seven.
Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below. This is a guide based on official product documentation and pricing, rather than a hands-on benchmark of all seven tools.
| Tool | Useful for | Entry option |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Google search performance and indexing | Free |
| Screpy | Ongoing audits and rank tracking | Pro: $77/year welcome offer; $192/year before offer |
| Screaming Frog | Local technical crawls | Free up to 500 URLs per crawl |
| Ahrefs Free | Your site's backlinks and audit data | Free, with verified-site limits |
| Keywords Everywhere | Keyword research in your browser | Bronze: $84/year |
| PageSpeed Insights | Page performance diagnostics | Free |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Bing search and indexing diagnostics | Free |
Pricing checked October 15, 2026. Dollar amounts are USD; check checkout for applicable taxes and the final total. Annual plans require an upfront payment; Screpy's welcome offer has a time limit, explained below.
1. Google Search Console: see what Google is already sending you
Start here if you have a live project and don't know whether anyone is finding it through Google.
Google Search Console is free. It gives you search performance and indexing reports for your site, including queries, clicks, impressions, and average position.
A useful first job is to inspect one important page. Open its search queries and compare them with what the page actually offers. If people find your invoice generator through searches about recurring invoices, does the page explain whether it supports them?
You now have a specific content question to investigate. You don't need another subscription to discover it.
Use URL Inspection when an important page seems absent from search. Keep that investigation separate from rewriting its title: an indexing problem and an unconvincing search result need different fixes.
The limit is scope. Search Console reports your site's Google performance; it doesn't provide a competitor research database or tell you which visits became paying customers.
2. Screpy: keep ongoing SEO work in one place
Consider Screpy when you want to keep checking your site as you ship, with technical audits, keyword rankings, and performance monitoring in one product.
For a small project, the practical question is whether you need recurring checks or an occasional diagnosis. If you only want to crawl a few pages today, a free option may be enough.
The current Screpy pricing gives you two relevant starting points:
- Pro: $192/year before the welcome offer, currently shown at $77/year with it. Includes five projects, 5,000 crawl pages per project, and 100 tracked keywords per project.
- Max: $456/year before the welcome offer, currently shown at $182/year with it. Adds AI Visibility, including 50 monitored prompts per project, along with keyword research and backlink tools.
Pro does not include AI Visibility. Choose Max if tracking brand mentions and citations in stored AI answers is part of the job you need done.
The pricing page advertises a 60% welcome offer with a 72-hour window and a seven-day trial. Check the checkout total and renewal terms before committing.
There's also Screpy MCP. With a compatible AI assistant connected, you can investigate project evidence without opening the dashboard for each question. Account permissions, available data, and plan limits still apply.
3. Screaming Frog: crawl a small site for free
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler. The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs at a time, which makes it worth considering for a small marketing site or a focused technical check.
For a developer, a useful time to run it is after changing routes, navigation, or page templates. Look for broken internal links, redirects, missing titles, and duplicated metadata. Trace a finding back to the page or template that needs changing.
For example, if your navigation still links to an old pricing URL, update the source link rather than adding another redirect to hide it.
The free tier has important boundaries: saving and reopening crawls and JavaScript rendering require a licence, as the official FAQ explains. That matters if your app's content only appears after JavaScript runs.
Use it for a specific diagnostic task. You can decide whether the paid features are necessary once you know what the free crawl leaves unanswered.
4. Ahrefs Free: inspect backlinks to your own site
You don't need a paid Ahrefs subscription just to start looking at your own site's backlink profile.
Ahrefs Free, previously called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, includes limited Site Explorer and Site Audit access for websites you verify. It is a permanent free account, rather than a trial that expires after a week.
The documented limits include 5,000 crawl credits per month per project and up to 1,000 backlinks or keywords visible at once.
Start by looking at which pages attract links. Is a useful free tool getting attention while your product page gets none? That can suggest where to improve the path from the resource to the product, provided the link would actually help its readers.
The ownership requirement matters. This free account is useful for investigating your own properties; it isn't unrestricted access to competitors' backlink profiles.
It also overlaps with other audit tools in this list. You can use the backlink reports without deciding to maintain another full auditing routine.
5. Keywords Everywhere: research keywords while browsing
If you prefer exploring search results to learning another dashboard, Keywords Everywhere is worth a look. It adds keyword metrics to supported websites as you browse.
The Bronze plan costs $84 per year, equivalent to $7 per month, with 100,000 credits and one user seat. You pay annually. Credits expire after a year.
One credit retrieves metrics for one keyword. A single search can spend more than one credit because related-keyword widgets also request data. That detail matters more than the headline allowance if you leave the extension running during ordinary browsing.
A practical starting point is to compare phrases around one product use case: “invoice generator,” “invoice generator for freelancers,” and “recurring invoice software,” for example.
Then open the results and inspect what searchers are being shown. Are they looking for a free utility, a software subscription, or an explanation? A volume estimate helps prioritize research; it doesn't answer that intent question for you.
Buy it when you'll do keyword research regularly enough to use the allowance. An annual commitment deserves more thought if you only need one afternoon of ideas.
6. PageSpeed Insights: find the performance problem worth fixing
PageSpeed Insights is a free place to investigate a slow landing page before buying another performance tool.
Run an important page on mobile and desktop. Look at the diagnostics behind the score, especially after adding a video, a large hero image, or several third-party scripts. Choose one supported finding, make the change, and check the page again.
The distinction to understand is lab data versus field data. Lab results come from a simulated run. Field results describe real users' experiences and need enough samples to appear.
An indie project may not have page-level field data yet. The report may show origin-level data instead, or no field data at all. Check which you're reading before drawing conclusions.
A higher lab score can help confirm progress in that test. It doesn't tell you whether your signup flow works better, and it isn't a promise of higher search rankings. Keep the goal tied to the actual page problem.
7. Bing Webmaster Tools: check a second search engine
Google Search Console can't tell you everything about how Bing sees your site. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and supplies its own performance, indexing, and crawl diagnostics.
You can import a verified site from Search Console to get started. Then inspect an important URL, check your sitemap, and look at Bing's search performance reports. Site Scan also provides an on-demand technical audit.
Its value is the additional search-engine perspective. If Bing reports a problem, investigate the affected URL instead of assuming a clean Google report settles the question.
Keep the claims modest, though. Being indexed by Bing doesn't prove that an AI assistant recommends your brand. Indexing reports and recorded mentions in AI answers measure different things.
This is a sensible free addition when Bing is relevant to your audience. You don't need to invent a daily reporting ritual if there's little data or no decision to make yet.
Build a small SEO stack before buying a bigger one
For a new side project, I'd start with three jobs:
- Understand search visibility: set up Search Console and inspect your important pages.
- Find technical problems: choose a crawler or audit workflow and turn the findings into a short fix list.
- Check page performance: use PageSpeed Insights on the pages visitors actually land on.
Add paid tooling when you can name the recurring task it will handle. That might be keyword research with Keywords Everywhere, or ongoing audits and tracking with Screpy. Neither purchase is automatically necessary just because the project launched.
There's overlap here. Screpy, Ahrefs Free, Screaming Frog, and Bing Site Scan can all contribute technical findings. You don't need four versions of the same backlog. Keep the tools whose output helps you decide what to change.
If you already use an AI assistant, my five SEO workflows with ChatGPT show how to turn available data into reviewable work.
Before paying for your next SEO tool, write down the next task you'll use it for. If that task is unclear, spend an hour with the tools you already have.
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