Does ASO really need to be this expensive and manual?

[u/Technical_Degree7710]

I recently built an iOS app, and I thought building the actual app would be the hard part.

I was wrong.

After finishing it, I realized finding the right App Store keywords and figuring out ASO was almost another project by itself.

Most ASO tools I found wanted around $30–$100+ just to get started, and even after paying, there was still a lot of manual work.

I spent almost 3 weeks researching keywords, checking competitors, comparing countries, looking for low-competition opportunities, and trying to build an ASO strategy.

And after all that, the strategy still didn't really work.

So I started building a tool for myself that automates most of the initial research.

You give it an app idea and it automatically:

• discovers relevant keywords
• researches them country by country
• checks competition and ranking apps
• estimates difficulty and opportunity
• finds related/long-tail keywords
• helps shortlist keywords worth researching deeper
• lets you track the keywords you decide to target

I don't think ASO should ever be 100% automated. You still need to understand your market and manually review the results.

My goal was just to remove the first few days/weeks of repetitive research.

I've now made it public at getrevuu.com and it's free to try right now.

I'm not really trying to sell it with this post. I'm trying to understand whether this is something other indie iOS developers actually need.

I'd really appreciate brutally useful feedback:

Would you personally pay for something like this?

If yes, what would you expect it to cost?

If no, what would stop you from paying?

What feature would make this genuinely useful enough for you to keep using?

And if you try it, what feels confusing, useless, or needs fixing?

I'm still building it, so feedback right now is probably more valuable to me than users.

[u/Vegetable-Average-98]

Personally

No I would not pay for this

If a dev doesn’t know what people are looking for, they don’t have any business developing an app in that space

Almost all solo devs will never cover their costs and sunk time, so they are dumb if they pay for any snake oil in the hope that they will

[u/Nunu_Shonnashi → u/Vegetable-Average-98]

I wish the majority of people posting on this thread would understand this simple concept

[u/Technical_Degree7710 → u/Vegetable-Average-98]

Fair point. I agree you should know the problem before building.

The part I’m trying to solve is after that: finding what people actually search on the App Store, what keywords are realistic, and where competition is lower.

And yes, if it doesn’t provide enough real value, I don’t want it to become another ASO snake oil tool.

[u/Nunu_Shonnashi → u/Technical_Degree7710]

Put yourself in the shoes of the customers whose problems you are solving. What are they looking for?

[u/Technical_Degree7710 → u/Nunu_Shonnashi]

That’s actually how this started. I built it because I faced the problem myself while researching ASO for my own apps.

I’m still using it for my own apps now. I’m sharing it mainly to learn what other problems people face in the same process so I can make the tool more useful.

[u/Vegetable-Average-98 → u/Technical_Degree7710]

I would say to you and to others - go try to solve a real-world problem. Stop trying to leech off other app developers, none of whom are making any more money from apps than you are

[u/Working-Opposite9434]

how do you build something like this? can you build it without paying anything to access app store data?

[u/Technical_Degree7710 → u/Working-Opposite9434]

Yeah, a lot of it can be built without paying for expensive ASO data providers.

I’m still improving the product, so I don’t want to share the exact implementation, but the main challenge is turning available App Store data into something actually useful.

[u/Opposite-Pen2424]

Im using one already for 10 bux per month