Cheapest SEO Tools: The Real Price Floor

Overview

The cheapest SEO tools and the cheapest way to run SEO work are two different questions. A pricing page answers the first one, and it answers it quickly. The second one depends on how much client work a plan holds, how many people need to sign in, and what leaving costs.

This page is about the price floor, and it is deliberately narrow. It covers the lowest published tier from each platform, what that tier states about its own limits, the free routes that exist alongside the paid ones, and the arithmetic that turns an entry price into a cost per client. It does not repeat the five-client agency totals on our affordable SEO tools for small businesses guide, and it does not repeat the annual-versus-monthly and seat multiplier analysis on the SEO software cost guide. Those two pages price a client book. This one prices the bottom of the ladder.

The floor has three levels. The lowest level is free: first-party tools that cost nothing and need nothing but a verified property. The middle level is the cheapest published paid tier, which in this set runs from $29 to $49 per month and is usually built for a single operator. The top level is the cheapest plan that states how much client work it holds, which starts at $103.20 per month on annual billing with SE Ranking Core.

The cheapest plan that states a project count is usually the cheapest plan that works. Ahrefs Starter costs less than a quarter of SE Ranking Core, and that difference is real, but the Ahrefs pricing page publishes no limits for Starter. You are buying an unpriced ceiling. Moz Pro Starter costs $49 and covers one website, which is a real allowance and a small one. Anyone running client work has to look at the third level, and that is where the money actually goes.

Everything on this page was read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 29 October 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, this page says so rather than estimating it.

How we priced this

Four rules keep the comparison honest.

The figure is what the vendor displays. Prices are the US dollar figures shown on the vendor's own pricing page on 29 October 2026. Where a page shows both a monthly and an annual rate, both are given. Where a page shows only one, only one is given, and the page is named as billed that way.

A missing figure stays missing. Ahrefs publishes no plan limits for Starter. Moz publishes no annual price and no keyword or crawl allowance for Starter. Surfer publishes no monthly price on any tier. Those gaps are recorded as gaps, because filling them would mean inventing numbers.

Derived figures are arithmetic, not forecasts. A cost per project is a published price divided by a published allowance on the same page. It is not a prediction of value, and it excludes add-ons, seats and taxes.

No claim is made about demand or difficulty. This page does not state search volumes, difficulty scores, ranking chances or revenue. It reports what five vendors publish about their own software.

The cheapest published entry on each platform

The table lists the cheapest SEO tools by published price, and the sort is misleading on purpose. The two cheapest rows are the two rows with the least stated capacity, and the third cheapest row is a yearly-only content tool with no AI prompt tracking at all. Price alone ranks these five platforms in the wrong order for anyone with client work to deliver.

Ahrefs Starter is the cheapest published tier and the least documented one. Its price is unambiguous at $29 per month. Its capacity is not published on the pricing page, so there is no way to work out how many projects, keywords or crawls it carries. Buying it is buying an unknown ceiling at a known price.

Moz Pro Starter answers a narrower question. At $49 per month it is the cheapest tier here that names its customer: "designed specifically for individuals managing a single website". That is a published scope, and it stops at one site. Moz also publishes no annual rate for Starter, so the 20% yearly discount the page advertises elsewhere does not apply to this tier.

Surfer Discovery is the cheapest content tool, on yearly terms. The page prices Discovery at $49 per month billed yearly, with a stated saving of $120, and lists 120 documents, 10 tracked pages and 1 team seat. The comparison table underneath shows "Track 0 AI prompts" and "No prompt refresh" for that row, so the AI visibility tracking the platform leads with is not part of its cheapest tier. Every price on the Surfer page is the yearly-billed rate, and the page states that annual plans are charged for the entire year.

SE Ranking Core is the cheapest tier that states a client capacity. At $103.20 per month billed annually, or $129 monthly, it lists 10 projects and one manager seat alongside 2k keywords and 100 AI prompts tracked daily, 5 GEO domains, 250k audit pages per month, 25K API credits and MCP access. It is the entry tier in this set where a buyer can divide a price by a number and get a defensible per-client figure.

What the free plans actually include

Free access is real on three of these platforms, partial on one, and absent on one more. The differences matter more than the word free.

Semrush Free is the only permanent free plan in this set. It does not expire, needs no card, and includes the AI Visibility features. Its stated limits are one demo project and 10 reports per day across all vital tools, which makes it a data-sampling route rather than a working project allowance. The word "demo" is Semrush's own. Anyone planning client work should read it as a limit rather than a plan.

Ahrefs Free is a site-owner tool. Its stated scope is limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit. It is the route Ahrefs itself recommends in place of a discount or a trial, because the vendor states plainly that it never runs discounts.

Moz's free layer is the broadest. Five free tools are listed on the pricing page, including Domain Analysis and Link Explorer, and a free Moz Community account extends limited access to MozBar, Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer. Moz also offers a free trial, but on the Medium tier rather than on the two cheapest ones.

SE Ranking has no free plan, and its trial is the most usable free route here. Fourteen days, no credit card, up to 10 projects, 750 tracked keywords per day, 20 AI prompts per day, and AI competitive research for up to 3 domains with unlimited reports. For a buyer who needs to test the workflow on real client sites before paying, that is the only free route in this set that permits a real client book.

Surfer publishes no free plan. Its sign-up buttons read "Start for Free" and link to a billing checkout, so no free allowance is claimed for it here.

What a $29 to $49 plan cannot do

The cheapest tiers are not failures. They are scoped, and the scope is usually one person.

They cannot be budgeted from the page. Ahrefs Starter states no limits, so capacity is unknown until you are inside the product. Moz Starter states one website but no keyword or crawl allowance.

They are built for one operator. Moz Starter is written for individuals with a single website. Surfer Discovery includes one team seat. Ahrefs Starter sits below tiers whose seat rules are explicit.

They do not cover client reporting. White label reporting, client seats and branded reports sit on higher tiers or on paid add-ons across this set, which is the subject of our SEO software for consultancies guide.

They do not extend cheaply. Surfer Discovery is priced yearly with no monthly option, so the commitment is a year. Moz Starter has no published annual rate, so there is no discount to take. Ahrefs Starter sits below Lite, where extra users cost $40 per month each on a plan that includes one.

They do not include history. Ahrefs Lite stores six months of performance history, Standard two years and Advanced five. A consultant producing year-on-year reporting cannot do it on the shortest setting.

Free first-party tools that are not a product

There is a floor below the floor. Three tools cost nothing and cover the questions that matter most about a site you own.

Google Search Console is free for a verified property and reports how the site is indexed, which queries it appears for and which pages receive impressions. Bing Webmaster Tools is free with an account and covers the same ground for Bing, including URL submission. Google Analytics is free for a site you control and reports on the traffic that arrives.

The limits are structural rather than commercial. These tools report on properties you can verify, so they cannot research a competitor's keyword portfolio or analyse a domain's backlink profile. They do not optimise content, track a client's ranking history across search engines, or produce a report with your brand on it. That is the gap the paid tiers in this guide exist to fill, and it is worth being clear that a cheap paid plan replaces none of them. Search Console stays useful after you buy anything.

Cost per client on the cheapest plan that fits

Four platforms publish both a price and a project or site count on the same page, which makes a per-unit figure possible. Each is the annual rate divided by the stated allowance.

The spread is wide, and the reason is the allowance rather than the price. SE Ranking Core and Ahrefs Lite are nine dollars apart in monthly terms and fifteen dollars apart per project, because Core states ten projects and Lite states five. Moz Pro Standard is the cheapest plan in the table and the most expensive per site, because it holds three.

Three caveats belong with those figures. The annual rate assumes you pay for a year, and SE Ranking states that annual plans are billed upfront. The allowance is the stated project or site count, and add-ons, seats and API credits sit outside it. And none of these figures accounts for the second person, who costs $16 per month on SE Ranking, $45 per month starting on Semrush, $49 per month on Moz Pro and $40 per month on Ahrefs Lite.

The traps that make a cheap plan expensive

Annual-only add-ons. SE Ranking prices the Agency Pack and the API add-on on annual billing only. The Agency Pack is listed at $69.00 per month on annual terms, and the standalone API plan starts at $179.00 per month, also annual only. A monthly customer who needs either has to move the account to annual terms.

No monthly price at all. Every figure on the Surfer pricing page is the yearly-billed rate, and the page states that annual plans are charged for the entire year. There is no monthly figure to compare against the rest of this set.

Seat arithmetic. Every Ahrefs plan from Lite to Advanced includes exactly one user, with extra users at $40, $60 and $80 per month and caps of 2, 5 and 10 respectively. Moz charges $49 per month per seat on any plan level. Semrush prices additional users from $45 per month. SE Ranking starts extra manager seats at $16 per month. The cheapest seat in this set is also on the plan with the lowest cost per client.

Refund terms that are narrow. SE Ranking states that payments are non-refundable except where the service was not delivered as promised. Ahrefs states that it does not issue refunds in general, and that a monthly subscriber can request one only if the service has not been used. Moz states that you may cancel or change plans at any time, with no questions asked, which is the most permissive wording here.

Credits that reset on a plan change. Surfer states that credits reset yearly or after a plan change, so an upgrade or downgrade mid-year restarts the allowance.

Who should not buy the cheapest plan

Two people who both need to sign in. Add the seat or move up a tier. On Ahrefs the seat price changes with the plan, and on Moz it is a flat $49 per month.

Anyone producing client-facing reports under their own brand. The white label routes sit on add-ons or higher tiers, and we price them in the consultancy guide.

Anyone needing API access. Ahrefs includes API access from Lite upward, SE Ranking sells an API add-on on annual terms and a standalone API plan, and Surfer lists API access on its top consumer tier.

A one-person practice that only needs one seat. Moz Pro Starter at $49 is the cheapest purpose-built option, and our SEO tools for freelancers guide covers that decision in full.

A five-client agency totalling the bill. The SEO software cost guide and the affordable SEO tools page handle that arithmetic, including the seat multiplier and the annual billing gap.

Our verdict

SE Ranking Core is the cheapest plan here that states how much client work it holds. At $103.20 per month billed annually it lists 10 projects and one manager seat, which is $10.32 per client project per month, and its extra manager seats start at $16, the lowest in this set. For a small agency or a consultant with a real project list, it is the cheapest tier that removes the guesswork.

Ahrefs Starter is the cheapest price and the least predictable one. At $29 per month it is the lowest published tier, and the vendor publishes no limits for it. It is worth testing if the plan is a stepping stone, but it cannot be budgeted against a client book from the pricing page alone.

Moz Pro Starter is the cheapest plan with a named scope. At $49 per month it covers one website for one person, with no annual rate published and no keyword or crawl allowance stated.

Semrush Free is the only permanent free plan. One demo project and 10 reports a day is enough to judge the data and not enough to run work, and it costs nothing to keep.

Surfer Discovery is the cheapest content tier, on yearly terms. At $49 per month billed yearly it carries 120 documents and 10 tracked pages with no AI prompt tracking, so it is a content tool at the bottom of its own range rather than a cheaper version of the platform's headline product.

The cheapest plan is a false economy in one specific case. If more than one person needs access, or the work needs a client-facing report, the entry tier that looked cheapest stops fitting within the first month, and the seat or add-on that fixes it costs more than the difference between tiers.

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