OpenSEO runs a full SEO suite on your own machine
One line in this app's public source says exactly how much money the company makes. Anyone can read it. This is OpenSEO.
Keyword research, rank tracking and backlinks, running on your own machine.
OpenSEO is an SEO app you run yourself. It finds keywords. It tracks where you rank. It pulls a site's backlinks. Point Claude Code at it and your agent gets real search data.
Three prices, one kind of work.
Ahrefs Lite costs a hundred and twenty nine dollars a month. Their Starter plan costs twenty nine. OpenSEO costs ten. So what is that money buying? The answer is one line of code.
One constant, and it is the whole business model.
const MARKUP = 1.28; // OpenSEO's flat 28% premium over raw DataForSEO cost
Their pricing file sets a constant called markup to one point two eight. They buy the data. They add twenty eight percent. That is the whole business. Almost no company publishes its margin. Theirs sits on the default branch of a public repo. And that same number runs in the code that charges your account.
The app is open source. The index is rented.
Somebody has to read the whole web and remember it. That crawler is the expensive part. OpenSEO does not own one. It rents that data from a wholesaler called DataForSEO. So the part they open sourced is the app. The index underneath is still rented. Ask which half you are renting next time.
What ten dollars actually buys.
OpenSEO comes from Ben Senescu. Ten dollars a month buys ten dollars of credit. It buys two thousand local search checks, or two hundred keyword runs, or a hundred and twenty six backlink profiles. Or nine AI visibility scans. Nine. One scan costs about twenty two times a keyword run.
They built a broken website on purpose.
They also built a website out of SEO mistakes on purpose. Missing titles, a redirect loop, a page nobody links to. One page breaks six ways at once. They test their own crawler against it. They want you to check their work, like that line in the pricing file.
OpenSEO
The index is rented.
The margin is in the file. The index is rented. Now you know which is which.
