OpenSEO

The open source Ahrefs alternative

Open Source

Marketing

SEO

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The SEO tool market has needed price pressure for years. Incumbent pricing assumes an agency budget, and I run SEO for a niche B2B product paying for data I mostly do not use. I saw the sourcing question below already, so mine is about the long tail: niche B2B keywords (healthcare software in my case) often show zero or missing volume even in the big tools. How does OpenSEO handle those low-volume terms, does it estimate, show zero, or mark them as no-data? For niche products the long tail is the entire game, so that answer matters more to me than head-term accuracy. Congrats on the launch, the open source route is the right wedge here.

Love this!! 🙌 already canceled my Ahrefs subscription and installed OpenSEO on my Hetzner VPS. Would love if there would be a usage credits tracker and a general overview of all my domains via a dashboard like Ahrefs does, but it's a solid start. Keep it up! 💪

@bensenescu What would be really useful is the ability to share individual URLs with a client—for example, by making a URL publicly accessible for seven days or permanently.

The product is solid and I love the way you give support on Discord. Top notch. Go @bensenescu !

#1 well deserved 🥇 open source ahrefs at $10/mo is kinda insane. how are you sourcing the backlink data?

Long-time Ahrefs user here, and the price gap is real — but the moat has always been the crawler and index freshness. What is your crawl coverage like today, and how often does the backlink index refresh? If the data quality holds up for mid-size sites this becomes very easy to recommend.

I might be missing a bit, but the practical question for me is where OpenSEO saves time first: setup, review, or handoff? That usually decides whether I keep a dev tool after the first week.

I will give this a try. Ahrefs and SemRush definitely have a monopoly hold over SEO for way too long. I guess it's the data that others are not able to access thus making it expensive.

Congrats on the launch. The MCP plus real SEO data angle is strong. The part I would want as a user is traceability: when an agent suggests a keyword or page update, can I click through to the actual SERP, keyword, or backlink evidence it used? That would make agent SEO recommendations much easier to trust.

@bensenescu The GSC loop is the part I'd stress-test. When we wired an agent to the Search Console API, the last 2-3 days of rows were still settling, so anything published Friday read as flat until Monday and the agent kept trying to "fix" work that was actually fine. We ended up throwing away the trailing 72 hours before letting it draw any conclusion. Does yours hold that window back, or does it read the freshest rows it can get?

@Ben Senescu makes sense, DataForSEO is a solid choice, that keeps you from having to run your own crawler at that scale. good answer, thanks.

I've been on the content side for a while — writing-focused, not SEO-first — and the pricing of every serious SEO tool has always assumed you're an agency running five client accounts. You just need to know which topic gaps actually exist before you spend three weeks writing something nobody will find.

The open-source angle here matters more than the price tag, though. Most content people I know aren't going to self-host anything, but knowing the data layer is DataForSEO and auditable changes how much you trust the keyword numbers. Black-box confidence scores are the part that always made me discount the recommendations anyway.

Congrats on shipping this — curious how the content-brief workflow compares to using the backlink data directly for topic research rather than competitive analysis.

This fills an immediate need and fits right into my agent workflow. Trying it out right now.

The $10/mo + MCP + GSC loop is a genuinely appealing combo for solo founders who can't justify a $100 Ahrefs seat. Curious about the cold-start case though: for a brand-new domain with basically no rankings or backlinks yet, does the agent still give useful direction, or does it need some baseline history to work from first?

The data grounding solves half the problem. The other half is what the agent does with it: give an agent keyword targets and it will happily over optimize, stuffing the exact phrases until the content reads generic and obviously machine written. Real data plus a light touch on the writing is where this gets genuinely useful. How opinionated is it about the output, or does it leave the writing style to you?

Thanks for the straight answers on DataForSEO all through this thread. One follow-up now that GSC is in the loop: does the agent get ranking history as its own MCP tool, or does it come back bundled with the keyword call? We found agents behave very differently when the "what happened after we shipped" data is a separate tool they have to decide to call, instead of something that arrives for free with the research.

Congrats — #1 on a Sunday is no accident. The self-host option is the part I find most interesting: if I run it on my own Cloudflare/Docker, what happens to the data layer? Do I bring my own DataForSEO key and pay them directly, or does usage still route through your account? Asking because that's usually where 'open source' SEO tools quietly stop being self-sufficient — the index is the moat, not the code.

This looks and work really well, just 10 minutes in using it and I can see the ease-of-use and clarity! Adding my 2nd project and will add more. Tip: when adding 1st project it didn't pick the name of the "google search console", just default, so it was a bit tricky to figure out that "a project" was the way to add another. Great work otherwise!