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Show HN: I’ve made a cheaper SEO research tool
In the last 13 months I've spent total $1297 for Ahrefs subscription. Sounds like a little too much so I've build my own Keywords Research tool - Telescope.
While building it my total bill was $51 for 2 months and 41k+ keywords found. Every page of keywords costs $0.03 - $0.05. 2 payment options - usage-based subscription or just top up your balance with the amount you'd like to.
Telescope includes a couple of things:
- Keywords Explorer - finding keywords based on seed phrase and filters
- Keywords Ideas - keywords on interception on provided keywords
- Ranked Keywords - keywords a domain you specified with their positions and change since last DB update
- Saved Keywords - to store found keywords and plan the SEO strategy
I've put a lot of love into it and would love to get some feedback. IMPORTANT: every new account gets some free balance to start with. Appreciate it!
- siyabuilt 2y agothis is so cool! Much simpler than all the other tools and even I know how to use it. Awesome work!
- cranberryturkey 2y agolooks cool do you have a trial version?
- kulhavy 2y agoThere is no trial version, but there is a "trial" balance you get after a sign up to try the application. Feel free to contact me on X (Twitter) @ilyakulhavy if you need a little more, thank you!
- rexreed 2y agoAre you also on LinkedIn? I stopped using X a while back and I have a bunch of questions on keywords and the site.
- kulhavy 2y agohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/keksonov/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/keksonov/ here I'm too @kulhavy in telegram
- hyperfuturism 2y agoYou don't have DMs open on Twitter, I think. I have some questions!
- kulhavy 2y agohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/keksonov/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/keksonov/ here I'm too @kulhavy in telegram
- nickreese 2y agoDropped you a note.
- merlindru 2y agoInstantly bookmarked! Great landing page, will definitely check this out. Keep up the great work :)
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you! We're working right now on adding On Page + Backlinks into the app so Telescope becomes go-to solution for SEO
- TecoAndJix 2y agoFYI - Your FAQ at the bottom of each use-case page does not expand
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you! We'll try to fix this asap.
- edweis 2y agoYour logo is very similar to https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/
- raimille1 2y agoAwesome!! Congrats on the value prop and landing!! Very clear. I run a marketplace in Brazil (kwara.com.br) and we happen to be focusing on SEO at the moment! What's your coverage in Portuguese / Brazilian market keywords? Or is it US only at the moment? (Ps, I don't mind the tool itself being in english)
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you! We have 150M+ keywords for Brazil (PT) and 30M+ for Portugal (PT) and tons of other countries/languages too
- iambateman 2y agoThanks for sharing! There’s so much opportunity to build lower cost tools here. Very cool.
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you! Our main goal is to make it affordable for makers like us. Paying $140\m doesn't seem like a good idea and not many has such a budged, so here is our solution
- tethys 2y agoDo you offer an API? My issue with most keyword tools is that their APIs suck, with tight limits that force you to only request data in bulk, and so on.
- baxtr 2y agoWhat I learned recently was that all the SEO tool basically query the same back end provider. So I guess it makes sense that there is innovation on the pricing model side of things. We use ubersuggest which has a lifetime pricing, quite neat.
- kulhavy 2y agoYou're right, that's exactly what out though process was. Thank you!
- matrik 2y agowhat’s the name of the backend provider?
- kulhavy 2y agoI'd prefer not to tell, thank you for understanding!
- alangibson 2y agoThat just confirmed that you're using "the same backend provider." Buy itself that's not bad. The problem is that if you're doing what everyone else is doing, then you're probably not realizing any efficiencies. That means your prices will eventually mirror everyone elses.
- weinzierl 2y agoI am confused. I always thought keyword tools use both: backlink data and estimated search volumes. For example ahrefs has, to the best of my knowledge, its own crawler for backlink data but mostly buys search volume estimates. Does your tool offer search volume estimates at all and does it come from the same provider as the backlink data?
- glenngillen 2y agoMajestic
- cmer 2y agoVery nice! Awesome landing page! FYI, the `www` version of your domain doesn't resolve. You might want to add a redirect.
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you! Oh, you're right! We'll fix this one asap
- Bewelge 2y agoThe background-color and content is missing when pressing the little question mark next to keyword details on the pricing page. Also thank you for sharing and congratulations on shipping. Will definitely try this out in the coming days!
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you for feedback! We'll fix this asap
- JourneyJourney 2y agoHow to understand the meaning of what I'm seeing on screen. I'm not versed into SEO but I'd like to. Your tool is very nice to use.
- weinzierl 2y agoHow important do you think this kind of tool is in the age of massive amounts of LLM generated text everywhere? While content mills that could crank out any keyword optimized content very cheaply existed for a long time it is now basically free. Whereas producing deep and well researched articles maybe doesn't need that razor sharp focus on specific keywords? Since you made this tool, you probably think otherwise, but I would like to hear your opinion.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago> the age of massive amounts of LLM generated text everywhere I would say that meaningless, soulless inputs had already inundated the WWW thanks to the economics of Search Engine Optimisation.
- yieldcrv 2y agoIt doesn’t matter what the reality is, it matters what every idea person, small business, and enterprise believes They believe they need to buy SEO services, this service can be offered cheaper than competitors
- BubbleRings 2y agoclicking FAQ from your hamburger menu button is busted fyi. good luck!
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you!
- scientific_ass 2y agoThis is super cool and I would love to try it out. We use SEMrush and they are basically charging us +$1000 dollar for the basic plan, with every other feature as an add-on for addition $200 - $400. Question: Do you have (or plan to provide) features like - -- Questions around the seed keywords -- Keyword exports for external analysis with details like volume, difficulty, etc, -- Can I tag keywords if I save them in a particular list? In my work, I do SEO research almost every day and have a very extensive keyword strategy. So above features are what's keeping me stick to SEMrush.
- kulhavy 2y agoHey, Thank you! We're planning to add premade filters for "Questions" and "Long tail" and a couple of others filtersets. Keywords Export is coming for sure. You can't tag just yet, but we will add this to backlog and implement according to our roadmap.
- vivzkestrel 2y agowhat would it take to build a SEMRush alternative?
- kulhavy 2y agoQuite some time but we'll get there one day
- abdellah123 2y agoThis is something I've been looking for for a while !! What about keywords for France? and in Arabic?
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you! 18M+ keywords for France. Arabic is supported, but not for France
- davidkuennen 2y agoThank you! This is great. Do you happen to know keyword tools that specialize on app store and play store search?
- kulhavy 2y agoHey! Our data provider has data from these marketplaces and if you stick for long enough with us we will add them for sure as current solutions are sooooo expensive.
- weinzierl 2y agoEmail sign-up would be nice.
- kulhavy 2y agoHey! Yes, you're right. We plan to add magic link sign up and a couple of other providers
- weinzierl 2y agoDo you provide keyword popularity and is it based on Google Keyword Tool data or clickstream data?
- kulhavy 2y agoHey! It comes from Google Ads (different tools)
- twapi 2y ago- No option to download as excel sheet - No option to sort by columns
- dsmurrell 2y agoI don't know that much about SEO. Are you planning on adding a blog section maybe with a few article about how someone might use a tool like this to optimise their own SEO?
- newbie578 2y agoWhat is the difference between this and Google Keyword Planner? I am asking this as someone with minimum experience in SEO
- kulhavy 2y agoTelescope comes with more details on the data - Keyword Difficulty, Historic Search Volume, Ability to preview google results for different countries, Keywords for your specific domains and your position. Soon we'll have backlink data and it'll open up even more details on Keywords, SERP Preview, Domain Overview
- p3rls 2y agoThese are the products that are being used to destroy the internet. It's like selling meth at a school playground to applause. Nice UI execution I guess.
- cchance 2y agoThe question mark on the "KEYWORD DETAILS" on the pricing page... says... HEY ..... lol
- kulhavy 2y agoHi! I forgot to update it, will fix soon, thank you!
- maxencecornet 2y agoFor OP: Would you say this is a drop-in replacement from ahref's lite plan ? What would I miss from ahref ?
- kulhavy 2y agoFor sure you win in pricing using Telescope, but here are the things to consider: There are quite a few limits in Ahrefs's Starter plan, but on the other hand you have access to Site Explorer and Site Audit which we don't have just yet. For Keyword Research it's almost 1:1. Thank you!
- j45 2y agoHi, congrats on the launch! Are searches cached locally in my account? I accidentally reload a page, it seems to run the search again and charge the (free and provided) balance. Thanks
- kulhavy 2y agoHi. Your searches cached locally for some time, reloading the page clears the cache
- willsmith72 2y agoagreed on this, caching would be very nice. i don't care if results are even a week+ out of date
- kulhavy 2y agoIt makes sense, I agree. We'll try to adjust this
- j45 2y agoThanks. I don't want it to take away from the accomplishment this is and look forward to the tweak - it seemed to further charge me if I reloaded an existing search page.
- samlinnfer 2y ago>Base your SEO strategy on higly precice and detailed data >higly precice
- foragerdev 2y agowhoever is wondering about the website home page design, it looks direct copy paste from here: https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/elements/headers#component-27e5f71ced91b88e3f6b59ca69033a83 https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/elements/headers...
- wcedmisten 2y agoThis is funny to me because it also looks just like Plausible Analytics' design. (They also used Tailwind). I guess both took heavy inspiration from the tailwind example design https://plausible.io https://plausible.io
- morbicer 2y agoThere was a bootstrap era, where everything looked the same. Then there was a materialUI'ish era, this was weaker in dominance because the design is more controversial and often downright bad in UX. Now we are in tailwind era. Not hating, it looks and works ok and I understand spending time on custom design is not something you should optimize for as an early stage era startup. But I do miss the times of mid noughts where people were playing with styles (css zen garden anyone?)
- throwaway425933 2y agoI hate that, on the linked page, most of the good ones are paid templates. :( Is there a repository of high quality but free templates. I hate to use bait and switch websites/frameworks.
- foragerdev 2y agoLet me know if you find one. You can design your website yourself by taking inspiration from other different websites but as a person who is not a web designer gaining consistency in your design is tough. Usually a template is not enough, it may help you with some scaffolding (such as setting a theme or fonts) but you need to have some knowledge about web design to at least make it look consistent.
- mceoin 2y agoHi - is there an API?
- kulhavy 2y agoHi, no and not planned yet
- czhu12 2y agoHow do these tools source data for alternative keywords, visits per site, visitor breakdowns, etc, competitor rankings, etc The only thing I can imagine is buying it from chrome plugins. How else would you scrape Google at that rate?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amanski 2y agoAwesome. All those tools are so freaking expensive.
- kulhavy 2y agoThank you!
- kundi 2y agoCould you enlighten us what is new here? Your marketing is quite misleading. The value of Ahrefs and SemRush is not in the research but in the representation the clickstream data and backlinks. The data you provide is available also for free in the Keyword Planner Tool, except that it isn’t visualized on fancy shadow-cdn tables. There are dozens of extensions that do all this for free. Nightwatch.io recently launched a free keyword research and everything else this seem to do, and much more powerful suite for a fraction of the price. It doesn’t have 3rd party data providers, and the most accurate ranking data, and I would personally not pay for anything that relies on the providers you mentioned (you can fact check how outdated their data is). I’m affiliated with Nightwatch and the SERP Simulator Chrome Extension.
- BoorishBears 2y agoDefinitely mention your relation to Nightwatch.io.
- willsmith72 2y agowhich part is free or available for a fraction of the price? the minimum i see on the pricing page is $39/month
- kundi 2y agoClick “research” in the top navigation
- PixelPaul 2y agoLooks to be just a basic UI to your data provider. What makes you better than all the others doing the same and selling it or open sourcing theirs?
- willsmith72 2y agolooks really cool, i've often through there should be an alternative like this, especially for just getting started my first feedback is i'm not totally sure on the difference between "keyword explorer" and "keyword ideas" on the home page it would be nice to add those names as meta titles too. I have both open in separate tabs, but it's not easy to tell which is which (page title is all "Telescope - Keywords Research Tool")
- willsmith72 2y agoit might be nice to explain somewhere how the billing works too. my first thought is "am i billed again if i go to page 2 of the results? or add a new filter?"
- kulhavy 2y agoThanks for feedback! We'll try to make it as clear as possible. To your question: you're getting billed every time request happens - second page and new filters produce a new request to get data from the provider
- qingcharles 2y agoThis isn't clear though, because under the search it tells you the number of results, so you think you've paid for all those results, but you haven't. You've only paid for the first page. And how can I export multiple pages?
- 0xDeveloper 2y agoIt's a much needed tool! I saw one more project do this with a credit based system, I read in this article: https://saasgodfathers.com/article/seo-tools-without-subscription-hassle https://saasgodfathers.com/article/seo-tools-without-subscri...
- kulhavy 2y agoThanks for the link
- bytemonitor 2y agoWhere do you get volume and CPC data? keyword planner API?
- kulhavy 2y agoIt does come from multiple tools inside Google Ads
- spaceman_2020 2y agoThis is super nice Keyword research should absolutely be a pay per use thing instead of a SaaS. So many marketers I know use Ahrefs literally for 2 days for keyword research for a new project and cancel right after. But they still have to pay for the full month.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kulhavy 2y agoExactly! I've been using Ahrefs for a couple times a months and the price is sill the same
- written-beyond 2y agoI'm not someone who has ever worked with SEO but I'd like to use this tool for other research purposes. Can you make a guide for someone who's entirely new to SEO but is experienced in the field of web and CS. The guide could cover jargon and how the tool can be used to get started, it would really offer me a huge reason to start using this. Right now all I know is I need to have SEO incorporated into my website but I have no idea how.
- kulhavy 2y agoI think the best place to learn is Afrefs Academy
- dzonga 2y agoone thing to be aware of - is SEO is a kind of a losing game. Cheap in terms of organic traffic since organic traffic costs 0. but then once you rank higher - google will have your competitors bid on your domain / keywords. then again you will pay the google tax on your domain. if you run a business that generates revenue from millions of low CPC's - e.g aggregation engines that sell clicks - and have millions of pages to spread traffic then SEO might be worth it. but then adept competitors - pursue mobile apps. hardly any tax there. -- that's why many sites push you to download their app. source - worked on an internal linking engine for an aggregator and was able to see the impact of SEO
- mgiannopoulos 2y agoSeems nice but going from a keyword search to my account and back, there was another charge on the credit as if a new search was done. This was I fear the charges will rise up with very minimal use.
- kulhavy 2y agoDouble checked, your search is cached for 5 minutes (that's the timeframe when new request would not happen)
- mgiannopoulos 2y agoIt was like 30 secs the back-n-forth The same happened when the tab was left opened for a long time and chrome auto-refreshed it or something to that effect. Again, it was counted as new search. This doesn’t seem like a good use of resources or how one would expect to spend « credits » It’s like being charged for a page view
- SergeAx 2y agoOn popular mid-sized websites spiders/bots traffic is about 50%. On less popular - up to 90%. Every new SEO tool adds to it. Vercel, Cloudflare et al will happily charge their customers for that parasite load. Web search engines will become worse because of it. Seems like we will be better off blocking it altogether.
- nhggfu 2y agoyour pricing for kw tracking seems nonsensical to me. eg i have a site where pages rank for 1,000+ keywords it has many pages like this.. tracking for just this ONE SITE would still cost me hundreds of dollars with your plan. add more sites, and we are paying thousands of bucks. seems like we should just roll our own serp scrapers + use proxies when pricing is out of hand like this ... [an ex ahrefs user. ditched it after ~ 4.5 years fwiw]
- 35mm 2y agoI don’t understand why people track keywords for their own sites with third party data, when Google Search Console hands over the real data for free.
- kulhavy 2y agoI'm not sure you got the idea. You wan't be charged for "tracking", but will be for getting keywords your site ranks for. So one page (50) of keywords your site ranks for would cost around $0.05. You can do it twice a week, resulting in 8 requests/month, $0.4 total bill.
- soygem 2y agoI hate SEO, it ruined the Internet
- krm28 2y agoawesome design!
- oloila 2y agoFrom your landing: Keywords Page 450 x $0.05 Keyword Details 150 x $0.04 Your estimated bill $29 > Semrush. Save up to 71% of your current bill While using semrush, you pay 4 times more, but it provides DAILY 3k requests. Your tool provides overall(not daily) 3k requests for the bigger price
- xz18r 2y agoJust FYI your logo is almost identical to that of Inoreader (apart from the color).
- noashavit 2y agoLooks interesting- good luck with the launch! I noticed that some keywords that I tried out in the overview page returned results, but the high level overview stated `search results : 0` - just wanted you to know :-)