SEO and marketing decision
Qadence
A single competent developer can build a useful replacement (Search Console ingestion, heuristics+LLM scoring, memory, dashboard, scheduled checks) in about a week; the product’s durable value appears to be polish and operations rather than proprietary data or network effects, so self-hosting is realistic.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off40 h to build
$120/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Qadence alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Connect to a site's Google Search Console, ingest historical GSC data, run heuristics+LLM-assisted analyses to detect pages losing positions and high-opportunity queries, surface prioritized action items, store decisions as simple project memory, and rerun checks on a schedule to surface new alerts.
What it still won’t have
- Polished product UX and onboarding polish
- Proprietary trained models or bundled LLM access (vendor-managed)
- Multi-site/team billing, advanced analytics dashboards, and commercial SLA
- Existing customer data, historical scale optimizations, and any closed integrations not reimplemented
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Qadence does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted SEO agent in TypeScript: use Next.js for the frontend, Postgres via Prisma for storage, and a small Node service for background jobs. Core features in scope: Google OAuth + Search Console API ingestion (last 90 days), normalized storage of queries/pages, analysis routines that detect pages declining, pages at positions 3–12, simple cannibalization detection, scoring by effort×conversion (heuristics + calls to an LLM API), per-project memory of decisions, a dashboard that lists prioritized actions and shows per-page trends, and a daily scheduler that recomputes signals and sends email alerts via an SMTP provider. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, advanced visualization libraries, integrations beyond Search Console, commercial SLA, and training custom LLMs. Include sensible error handling for API failures and rate limits, unit tests for data ingestion and analysis logic, and a Docker Compose dev deployment with a README and sanity-check script.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score86
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productQadence homepage
- open sourceyaojingang/GEOFlow
- open sourcenextacular/nextacular
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
