I worked in SEO SaaS. Raven Tools brought me out of Homes.com to Tennessee, back when the well-known tools in the space were Raven and Moz and Ahrefs was not a thought anybody had had yet.
So I have watched a specific thing happen over and over for fifteen years. Somebody builds a good tool. They price it near a hundred dollars a month. And then they die, because the first question is always “is that already in Semrush” and the second is “do I pay for this on top of Semrush”. You either stay tiny or you go enterprise. That ninety-nine dollar line has killed more good software than any algorithm update.
Ben Senescu walked around it instead of into it, and the way he did it is more interesting than the pricing.
He is not an SEO, and that is the point
Ben is a software engineer. He wanted to market his own open source projects, found the tools bloated and priced past what a solo builder would pay, and noticed people on r/TechSEO hand-rolling their own dashboards on top of DataForSEO. He asked whether they wanted an open source starting point, got a yes, shipped in a week, and has been building OpenSEO since February.
Open source does not mean free, and he is straight about it. Ten dollars a month, or bring your own data key, because the data actually costs money. That is the whole model: a small margin on consumption.
The thing I did not expect
The Reddit thread that validated the idea was professional SEOs asking for a customisable tool. The people paying are not those people.
“They aren’t comparing against Semrush, because they’ve never used Semrush before. It was totally inaccessible to them at that price point.”
And here is the part that reframed it for me. Price was only half the wall. The other half was that doing SEO used to cost you ten to twenty hours a week. A cheap tool made no sense in that world, because the licence was never the expensive part. Your time was.
Something else collapsed the time cost. That is what created this market, not the pricing. I have felt it from the inside this year going from Claude in a browser to the desktop app to running things in a terminal, and the change in what one person can actually execute is not incremental. It is the reason a ten dollar tool has customers who were not in the market at all eighteen months ago.
The line I keep coming back to
OpenSEO got popular and popularity showed up as sixty open pull requests from strangers. He closed external PRs and published a roadmap instead. In open source that is a real cost, because community contribution is supposed to be the reward.
“I could probably implement every feature in Semrush in three weeks with Claude Code, but they’d all be so slightly broken that it would just be impossible to fix. I think that’s the biggest thing in the AI era, figuring out: I can do anything. What’s the one thing I should do?”
That is the whole era in two sentences, and it is not really about software. Being able to build anything is no longer the constraint. Being able to check it is. I crashed my own little SaaS last week by asking Claude Code for something and not paying attention, which is a small version of exactly what he is describing.
He is right about domain rating too
Coming in fresh, without fifteen years of received opinion, he asks the obvious question nobody in the industry asks out loud any more.
“A lot of people want to increase their domain rating… But is that going to get you any organic traffic?”
A whole industry sells against a third-party score that no search engine uses. It takes a newcomer to say it plainly.
Where I pushed back on myself
I spent a chunk of this episode complaining that we are marketing in the dark, and I mostly stand by it. There is no data from Google on AI Overviews impact or click-through. Microsoft Clarity added query fan-out visualisation, Bing Webmaster Tools added a little, and whoever is running ChatGPT ads is presumably seeing numbers none of us will see.
But I had to walk it back partway on air. We still have search volume, we still have rankings, we still have reasonable click-through modelling. The fundamentals did not disappear, they just stopped being the whole picture.
Ben’s answer to the uncertainty is the same one Ann Smarty arrived at from a completely different direction: do good marketing, communicate your brand consistently, and stop trying to reverse-engineer a black box every quarter. What he says SEO gave him is a thinking tool, not a channel. Asking what people search for and what they ask turns out to be a better lens on positioning than “post what you think customers want”, and that holds whatever happens to the channel.
Full interview on Unscripted SEO, with the founder cut on Unscripted SaaS. Listen or watch. Ben is at openseo.so and on LinkedIn.