Analytics and monitoring decision
SpyFu
A limited competitor-research tool for a small set of domains is realistic for a single developer, but SpyFu's scale, freshness, and broad historical index are durable and impractical to replicate.
Visit website↗$39/mo
$468/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$50/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
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 SpyFu alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Search a competitor domain -> retrieve their paid & organic keywords and ad history -> store results -> present searchable results and allow CSV export
What it still won’t have
- Massive historical index (trillions of results) and cross-domain coverage
- High-frequency live updates and global coverage
- Enterprise features: white-labeling, unlimited exports, multi-user team controls
- Included official SpyFu API credits, prebuilt reports, and proprietary data quality
What remains hard
- Proprietary data
7.2 Trillion search results indexed
- Infrastructure at scale
Live Data Updated every 15s
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
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 lightweight competitor keyword-research service using Node.js (Express), React, and Postgres. Scope: 1) implement an HTTP integration to a paid SERP/keyword API (configurable API key) to fetch paid & organic keywords and ad-history for one domain; 2) normalize and store results in Postgres, including timestamp and source; 3) React UI to search by domain, show results table, keyword detail, and CSV export; 4) a scheduler to run weekly rank checks for tracked domains; 5) single-user auth and account page. Out of scope: large-scale crawling/indexing, historical multi-year archives, multi-seat billing, white-labeling, advanced AI features. Include error handling, retries for failed API calls, basic test coverage (unit tests for data import and API routes), and a Dockerfile for local deployment.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-6
- Evidence score61
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 productSpyFu - product
- official pricingSpyFu Pricing
- open sourceevery-app/open-seo
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
