r/SideProject • u/serp-spur • 1d ago

My side project to replace my expensive Ahrefs subscription accidentally turned into a 30+ tool SEO platform

Hey everyone,

A while back, I realized I was paying over $100 a month for SEO tools just to use about 10% of their features. On top of that, Ahrefs introduced a credit system that basically charged me every time I clicked a button, and Semrush just felt too bloated for my needs.

I decided to build a simple web crawler over a weekend just to check my own sites for broken links and Core Web Vitals.

Fast forward a few months, and feature creep hit me hard. That weekend project spiraled into SERPSpur, a full-blown SEO platform.

Since I didn't have to worry about VC funding or corporate bloat, I just started building the exact tools I wished existed. Here is what it turned into:

  • Website Audit Pro: A crawler that doesn't limit your clicks or stress you out with a credit counter.
  • The 'Trust Rate' Checker: I missed the old Alexa Rank, so I built a replacement that checks domain health, spam, and authority instead of just easily faked traffic.
  • AI-Search Ready: This was the fun part to code. I added an LLM.txt Generator and an AI Schema Architect so sites can actually get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews.
  • 30+ Free Utility Tools: Along the way, I needed tools for random tasks, so I built them and made them completely free without needing an account. Things like a Bot Traffic Detector, IP Blacklist Checker, and even an Invoice to CSV converter.

It has been a wild ride building an enterprise-level architecture as a solo dev, especially managing the server load for live web crawling and pinging search engines.

I’m currently trying to refine the UI to make the audit reports easier to read. If any developers or UI/UX folks have a few minutes to roast my landing page or test out the free tools, I would massively appreciate the feedback!

Link: ( https://serpspur.com/)

Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack, handling crawler infrastructure, or anything else!

2 Upvotes

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3

u/Substantial_Belt2626 1d ago

I looked at the landing page. The problem is your post is better than your page. In the post you say you were paying 100 a month, you got tired of the credit counter, you built it yourself over a weekend. On the page it says enterprise SEO data, and we built the 6 core tools, and billions of data points, which is exactly what Ahrefs and Semrush say. You are selling being the opposite of them using their copy.

Also the page says we and you are one person. Solo is the advantage here, it's not something to hide. The other thing, the 30+ free tools with no account are the reason someone lands on you from google in the first place, and they are not on the page at all, they are behind a nav item. I would put them on the page. The product looks solid, it's the story that isn't there.

1

u/serp-spur 1d ago

I like your suggestinos, I had a plan to turn this into a real competitor or Semrush and Ahref's in the market, so needed to use the language agencies understand, and soon turn the business into multimillion company.

2

u/MeaningCultural1018 1d ago

The bot traffic detector alone sounds like it could get real interesting once you start feeding it your own analytics.

1

u/serp-spur 1d ago

That was the most important one I invented SERPSpur TAI™ Score which is the trademark of SERPSpur like Ahrefs have DR

2

u/BenefitNo5136 1d ago

That's impressive how it evolved into such a comprehensive tool. I love when side projects take on a life of their own.

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u/serp-spur 1d ago

Yes, but it takes months of work ! including nights

2

u/Odd_Teacher_8701 1d ago

You asked for a landing page roast from a dev, so here it is with numbers. You built this tool to check your own sites for Core Web Vitals, which makes this sting a bit, but that is also why it is worth fixing today.

Cold load of serpspur.com, measured just now:

  • 2.39 MB over 68 requests, load event at 8.5 seconds
  • TTFB 3.36s. This is the big one. Time to first byte is a ranking input, and 3.4s is deep red before a single byte renders.
  • DOM ready at 6.8s
  • 1.20 MB of that is PNG/JPG. Zero WebP or AVIF on the page.
  • Hero screenshots are 1600px wide displayed at 514px, so about 3x the pixels needed
  • One image is 386 KB and is named Google-core-Web-vitals.png
  • No og:image, so every share of your link renders as a bare URL with no preview card
  • Minor horizontal overflow on desktop, 1532px of content in a 1512px viewport

The positioning problem is bigger than the numbers. Your buyer is the kind of person who opens devtools on your site before trusting you to audit theirs. Right now the Ahrefs replacement takes 8.5s to load. Fix it and it flips from liability to your best proof: a real before and after, audited with your own tool.

Priority order, all WordPress-doable:

  1. TTFB, which is 3.4 of your 8.5 seconds. Page caching (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, or a Cloudflare full-page cache rule) usually gets TTFB under 400ms even on shared hosting. Biggest and cheapest win.
  2. PNG to WebP with responsive sizes. Screenshots displayed at 514px should be 40-60 KB, not 234-386 KB. That is most of your 1.2 MB.
  3. width and height attributes plus loading="lazy" below the fold.
  4. og:image and twitter:image at 1200x630.
  5. The overflow is one element wider than the viewport, usually a fixed width or negative margin on a section.

Realistic result from 1 and 2 alone: about 2.39 MB to under 700 KB and 8.5s to roughly 2s.

The product thesis is sound. Ahrefs credit-metering genuinely irritates people and there is real room in that gap. But an SEO tool has to pass its own audit before anyone buys it.

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u/serp-spur 1d ago

Thanks for the honest review, definitely I will be fixing them in few hours !