SEO tool pricing is genuinely confusing: some tools charge per site, some per keyword, some per credit, and the number on the front page is often the annual price of the smallest tier. We went through the current pricing pages of over twenty tools in July 2026. Here is the map, so you can place any tool you're considering, including ours.
The four price bands
Band 1: rank trackers, roughly $25 to $80 a month. They tell you where you rank and nothing else. Mangools starts around $29, Wincher around €49, Nightwatch at €79. Fine tools, but when a page slips, the diagnosis and the fix are still your job. The premium end of pure tracking, AccuRanker, starts at $224.
Band 2: content optimization, roughly $49 to $129. Frase ($49), Surfer (€49 to €99 for the tiers most people buy) and Clearscope (from $129) score and improve content you are about to write. They shine when you produce new content regularly; they do less for content you already published that is quietly losing traffic.
Band 3: all-in-one suites, $129 and up, quickly $279 to $549. SE Ranking starts at $129, and the big suites' agency tiers run $279 to $549 a month. You get everything: backlinks, audits, tracking, competitor research. The honest question is how much of it you will open more than once.
Band 4: tools that do the work, roughly $99 to $499. The newest band: tools that don't just report but draft or apply changes. Alli AI charges $249 a month for 5 sites and $499 for 15. Tedrix sits here too, from $24 for monitoring and $59 with drafted fixes, per site. This band is where the time saving actually lives, and it's worth comparing what "doing the work" means in each tool: suggesting, drafting, or applying with an undo.
The three billing traps
- Credits that expire. Several tools sell monthly credit packs where unused credits vanish at month's end. The market is quietly moving away from this model (Rank Math, for example, replaced word credits with plain article limits), but check before you buy: does anything you paid for expire?
- The annual price shown as the monthly price. The big number on most pricing pages is the per-month cost IF you pay for a year upfront. The month-to-month price is often 20 to 25 percent higher. Neither is wrong, just read which one you're looking at.
- Overage you didn't plan for. Tools with hard per-unit meters (pages, articles, keywords) either stop working when you hit the cap or bill per extra unit. Both are fine if you know about them upfront.
What should a small business actually pay?
For context: an SEO agency retainer in Sweden typically runs 5,000 to 15,000 kr a month, and surveys put most European retainers under $1,000. Against that, the entire tool market is cheap. The practical guidance: start with free tiers (most serious tools have one), and expect to pay $25 to $80 a month for a tool that genuinely removes work for a single site. If a tool costs more than that for one site, it should be doing the work for you, not just reporting.
Where Tedrix sits
Since this is our blog: Tedrix prices per site, from $24 a month for monitoring with a prioritised fix list, $59 with drafted fixes you approve from your inbox, $99 with autopilot where every applied change is reported and revertible. No credits, nothing expires, and the audit that shows whether you need any of this is free. The full pricing is public here.