We run 10+ web products. For years our SEO tooling was a $100+/month subscription we mostly used for one job: technical audits. The keyword and backlink dashboards sat untouched while the bill renewed every month. At some point the math stopped making sense, so we rebuilt our stack around what we actually use. Here's the honest breakdown — what we kept free, what we replaced, and why.
What a technical audit actually needs to check
Before picking tools, it helps to know what you're auditing. The technical layer is finite and well-defined:
Crawlability — robots.txt, broken internal links, redirect chains
Indexability — noindex tags, canonical correctness, soft 404s, orphan pages
Sitemaps — only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs
On-page — titles, meta descriptions, one H1, valid structured data
International — hreflang reciprocity (if you're multilingual)
Performance — Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP)
That's it. None of it requires a keyword database or a backlink index — the two things you're really paying $100+/mo for in the big suites.
The free tools that cover most of it
Google Search Console is non-negotiable and free. The Pages report is the source of truth for what's indexed and why the rest isn't. PageSpeed Insights (free) gives you real Core Web Vitals. Screaming Frog's free tier crawls up to 500 URLs, which is plenty for small sites.
For a long time that was our whole stack: GSC + PageSpeed + free Screaming Frog. If your site is under 500 pages, you may not need anything else.
Where it broke down for us
The free Screaming Frog cap (500 URLs) is the wall. Several of our sites are bigger, and re-auditing them meant either the paid Screaming Frog licence (annual) or going back to a monthly suite. Both felt wrong for something we run after every deploy.
So we built our own crawler for the technical layer — and then, honestly, turned it into a product because other people we talked to had the same problem. It does the whole checklist above across the entire site, plus PageSpeed, with one-time pricing instead of a subscription ($9-49, credits never expire). It's the same engine we run on our own properties — if you want to see what it flags. It is not a keyword tool — we still use a separate (cheaper) option for that.
The actual takeaway
The point isn't our tool — it's the unbundling. Most people pay for a full SEO suite to use 20% of it. Split the jobs:
Technical audits → a dedicated crawler (free tier, a one-time tool, or paid Screaming Frog)
Keyword research → a cheaper standalone option, or free ones
Backlinks → only if you genuinely work on link-building
Most small sites and freelancers can cover everything they actually use for a fraction of a single suite subscription. We went from $100+/mo to a few dollars a year on the technical side, with no loss in what we could check.
Written by the Kalenux team.
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