Thinking of building my own serps tracker, sick of the high prices. Do you use one? If so, what do you pay per month? Would you use one? What would you expect to pay per month?
I think it's one of those projects that from the outside might seem basic, but the technical side of features grows quite rapidly. Speed is always a priority, so caching results is key. Accuracy is paramount, so localisation is required. Maybe run periodic background queries to maintain accuracy, and provide faster results on next visit. Historic data can prove useful to see improvements or issues. Data storage grows exponentially per project, per domain, per URL, per search term, per competitor, etc. If you start introducing API integrations then that starts to add to development costs per request. Page data (key ranking components) Domain data Keyword analysis Inbound link analysis Outbound link analysis I can see why companies charge what they do.
I use Ahrefs, SEMrush as secondary data sources.......but I prefer to keep the data on local machines aswell and not "in the cloud" so I'm a long term user of Rank tracker by Linkassistant and have done for probably 10 years, Pretty sure i pay something like £10 a month or something silly as I retired the rest of the suite and only use the Rank tracker now. One of my clients uses Serpbook ( now keyword.com ) and that was always quite friendly if your tracking thousands of phrases.
I use use nightwatch. I monitor a lot of client sites. Very accurate (I randomly check using localized connections). I produces reports etc, think it's around $60ish can't remember, it gets paid and works for me. I use the optimize version not the starter. If you have one site of course nightwatch isn't for you but for a lot of sites it can track 200 sites and 1000 keywords so I get my moneys worth.
I have used Webceo desktop for 10 years plus but they are trying to migrate to a cloud version which is 10x more expensive. I am testing link-assisant rank tracker which seems quite good so far. The price for his is $199 per year and the company does the rank checking from there own ip addresses so you can check your ranks from different countries with ease.