I couldn't afford Ahrefs, so I built 120+ free SEO tools.

Hey Product Hunt,

Solo dev here. This started with a simple problem: I needed SEO tools and couldn't justify $99–$399/month for them. So I started building my own.

Somewhere around tool #20, I noticed something that bothered me about the tools I was replacing. A lot of them show you numbers — search volume, difficulty scores, "AI visibility" — without ever telling you where those numbers come from. Sometimes it's real API data. Sometimes it's an AI estimate wearing a confident font. You can't tell the difference, and I think that's the point.

So I made one rule for myself: every tool has to wear a badge saying what it actually is.

🟢 Live — real data from real APIs
🔷 Live + AI — real data, AI analysis on top
✍️ Generation — AI wrote this, treat it like a draft
🧠 Analysis — AI opinion, not measurement

If a tool can't get real data (say, you haven't added an API key), it refuses to fake it. It literally returns an error saying "I won't estimate this and pretend it's live." I lost count of how many times I was tempted to soften that. I didn't.

115+ tools later, it's a full platform: keyword research, content generation, technical audits, an AI site auditor, and the thing I'm most excited about — a monitor that tracks whether ChatGPT and Perplexity actually mention your brand, with public scorecards anyone can check.

Free tier is 5 generations a day, no card. If you bring your own API keys, it's basically unlimited — you pay OpenAI/Anthropic directly instead of paying me a markup.

It's seofragments.com if you want to poke at it.

Two honest questions for this community:

1. Do honesty badges actually matter to you, or do users just want the number and don't care where it came from?
2. If you've built something with a "principled" constraint that made your life harder — did it pay off, or did nobody notice?

I'll answer everything in the comments.