I’m building SEO for AI — and it’s self-hosted, no subscriptions
Over the last year, I noticed something unsettling.
People are no longer discovering products the same way. Instead of searching on Google, they’re asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI tools for direct answers.
And most websites?
They’re completely invisible there.
Traditional SEO focuses on rankings. But AI doesn’t rank pages — it generates answers from sources it understands and trusts. That’s a fundamentally different problem.
So like many others in this space (including a few YC startups), I initially built Mayin as a normal SaaS with subscription pricing ranging from $150/month to $199/month. That was the “standard” pricing model in this category.
But I started feeling uncomfortable about it.
This space is very new. Most customers don’t even know:
What API calls are being made
What prompts are being sent
How much the actual AI usage costs
Where their data goes
Yet they’re paying huge monthly fees for something they can’t see or control.
That didn’t feel right to me.
So I made it my mission to build something fully transparent — where users have complete control over their data, their API usage, and their costs.
That’s when I rebuilt Mayin as a self-hosted AI visibility tool.
Now:
You host it yourself
You use your own API keys
You control your API costs
You own your data
No subscriptions
One-time payment
Lifetime product updates
Functionally, it helps websites become visible inside AI-generated answers — not just search results.
Philosophically, it’s my attempt to fight SaaS opacity and subscription fatigue.
Think of it as:
SEO for AI — without the SaaS tax.
