I was looking at Ahrefs, for example. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are useful when you want to understand your SEO, see where you stand, and work out what to improve.

But I don’t know what it is. Don’t ask me. My colleagues have tried asking, and I have given them the same answer: I just hate paying for Ahrefs and Semrush. These two apps in particular. I can’t explain it. I don’t want to pay for them.

When I think about a useful SEO setup across multiple domains, I mentally budget well over $100 a month. Somewhere around $170 to $250 is the sort of expense I have in mind, depending on the plan and what I need. That is a budget expectation, rather than a quote for either service, but it explains why I keep looking for alternatives.

Then I came across OpenSEO, an open-source alternative to tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks, site audits: the kinds of things that made me look at the paid suites in the first place. You can look at the source code and adapt it to your own needs.

Fantastic.

I also came across Postiz, an open-source social media scheduling tool. It has a hosted service, but you can also self-host the open-source version.

My God, the kind of technology and the quality of the tools becoming available this way are unbelievable.

Of course, open source does not mean every part of running the software is free. Hosting, maintenance, and data APIs can still cost money. With SEO in particular, having the software is one part of the equation; getting the search and backlink data is another. But having access to the code gives you room to shape the tool around what you actually need.

Then there is REA, or Reverse Engineer Anything. It connects AI coding agents to tools that help investigate how software works and use those findings to build a version of a particular feature for your own project.

That opens up another set of possibilities. You can study a workflow, understand a useful feature, and build something suited to your needs. With an open-source project, you can also work directly with the available code. REA is not a magic button that reproduces an entire service or its private databases, but the ability to understand and adapt specific features is already powerful.

Add Common Crawl to the mix, with its free, open repository of web crawl data, and you have another building block for your own use cases. The interesting part is putting these pieces together: the software, the data, and the AI assistance to build something useful around them.

The opportunities feel endless.

I keep thinking about all those little filing cabinets and drawers in your brain. The ideas you put away because they were too expensive, too complicated, or because you simply didn’t have the time or the team to build them.

Now AI is helping pull those ideas out of the drawers and turn them into something real. Open source gives you more of the building blocks to work with.

It couldn’t be a better time to be in business.