The under-$10-a-month SEO stack: what we actually run this company on

If you've asked "how do I do SEO without paying 130 pounds a month for Ahrefs", you've probably been told to just pay it, or to go mine Google Ads for keyword data. Both answers assume you have an agency's budget or an agency's patience. We had neither, so we built our stack from ungated sources instead, and because we publish everything, we can show the receipts: total tooling spend since this company's day zero, eleven days ago, is under $50. That includes reviewing 4,800 websites with AI, all our keyword research, and checking every page we've published into Google's index. One month of a single Ahrefs seat costs nearly three times more.

Here is the whole stack, cheapest first. None of it is a trial, and none of it caps out at a teaser tier.

1. Google Search Console: free, and the only ground truth

Everything a paid suite tells you about your own site is an estimate of what Search Console tells you for free: real queries, real impressions, real positions, real indexing states via URL Inspection. Rank trackers sample and model; GSC is the source they're modeling. Start here, and treat everything else as commentary. Our week-one field notes show what its data looks like on a brand-new domain, including the parts nobody shows you.

2. Keyword research: autocomplete beats guessed volumes

Google Autocomplete is real people's real phrasings, straight from the source, and it costs nothing to fractions of a cent to fetch at scale. The paid suites layer estimated search volumes on top; those estimates are resold third-party data, and for deciding what to write, they matter less than knowing the exact questions people type. We built our free keyword ideas tool on exactly this: seed keyword in, real questions, comparisons, and qualifiers out. Free, no signup. That tool's own output picked the targets for the post you're reading.

3. Index checking: stop squinting at site: searches

The site:yourdomain.com search is sampled, laggy, and famous for panicking site owners over pages that are indexed fine. Checking the exact URL with a proper diagnosis (noindex? robots.txt? redirect? canonical? or genuinely not picked up?) is what our free index checker does, five URLs a day, no signup. It's a piece of our paid pipeline we opened up because the check costs us almost nothing.

4. Open-source platforms plus pay-as-you-go data

If you want the full suite experience (rank tracking, competitor research, backlink data), the open-source route has matured: self-hosted platforms like OpenSEO connect to pay-as-you-go data APIs where a thousand keyword lookups cost cents. You pay for the data you actually pull instead of a subscription sized for agencies. The tradeoff is an afternoon of setup and bring-your-own API key; the saving is roughly everything.

5. IndexNow and honest sitemaps: free distribution plumbing

One HTTP request tells Bing and its ecosystem (which feeds several AI assistants) about every new or changed URL, instantly, free. Combined with a sitemap whose lastmod dates tell the truth, that's your freshness signaling handled for zero dollars. We measured what these methods actually do, timings included.

What this stack doesn't do

Honesty section, as always. This stack won't give you competitor backlink profiles (that data is genuinely expensive to collect; if you need it, pay-as-you-go APIs beat subscriptions until you're querying daily). It won't give you pretty volume charts, and it won't do the thinking. And on our own numbers: our under-$50 total covers tooling, not everything (domains, a small server, and our public link-buying pilot are separate, and all published). The point isn't that SEO is free; it's that the data access most subscriptions gate is mostly free at the source, and the gates are a business model, not a necessity.

The receipts

We run an SEO company on this stack, in public, with every outcome measured. If it's enough for us, it's probably enough for your site.