I built my own seo tool because i was tired of paying $200+/mo for tools i didn’t use or understand.

i don’t usually do launch posts. they feel weird. they always read like a press release dressed up in a personality 🤢

but i built something i need to tell you about, because if you’re reading this, you’re probably the exact person i built it for 👀

today i’m launching Plainly — an SEO platform built for bootstrapped founders, solo entrepreneurs, and indie hackers. it’s live right now at tryplainly.app. the free tier doesn’t even ask for a credit card.

let me tell you how we got here.

the $250-$449/mo problem

a year into building jem social, i looked at my software stack and almost threw my laptop across the room.

at some point, i was paying $449 a month for SEO software — Ahrefs, Semrush, plus a content optimization tool stacked on top. i used maybe 10% of any of them. the other 90% was dashboards i never opened, reports i never read, and feature breadth designed for marketing agencies billing five clients $2,000 a month each.

i’m not an agency. i’m a founder. building alone, mostly. doing my own seo at night between everything else. the math wasn’t math-ing.

so i went looking for the cheaper version. and that’s when i got pissed.

what i found: tools at $19–29/month that either had keyword data that was 30–50% off from the premium tools, or had real data but no workflow opinionation — they’d hand you 1,000 keywords and leave you to figure out which 5 to write about this week.

so the choices were: pay agency prices for features i’d never use, or pay founder prices for data that was wrong, or pay founder prices for data that was right but came with zero guidance on what to actually do with it.

that’s the gap. that’s the whole reason plainly exists.

what to do with this

if you’ve been struggling with seo and bleeding money on tools you don’t fully use — go to tryplainly.app. try the free tier. use the 9 free tools. no card. decide for yourself if this is the tool you’ve been waiting for.

if you write about seo, indie saas, or what’s happening to search in the AI era — bree@tryplainly.app. i’d love to talk.

if you’re just here watching me build — thank you. seriously. this one is a big one for me. it’s the second product i’ve taken from “i wish this existed” to “this exists now, you can use it today.” that doesn’t get less wild the second time.

i’m gonna keep documenting all of it — the plainly numbers, the jem social numbers, all ten apps, the whole mess. if you want the receipts as it unfolds, subscribe.

cheers…to building the thing that didn’t exist yet. ❤️

— bree