Off-the-shelf SEO and brand-monitoring tools from third-party vendors run on a subscription model, where the fee is charged for seats, the number of tracked keywords, projects and mentions, and for access to individual modules. The data the tool collects about a company's visibility and its competitors is stored on the vendor's infrastructure. The price on the price list usually covers a single user and the smallest scope, which makes the decision look cheap. The bill looks different once you scale it up: it grows with every person who gets access, every additional tracked keyword and every add-on module purchased.
The analysis below is based on the current price lists of three popular tools — Semrush, Ahrefs and the Polish Brand24 — as of June 2026. It shows what off-the-shelf tools really cost in PLN and USD, where the cost hidden from the price list surfaces, and what alternative is offered by tools built as a system owned by the company. The thesis of the whole piece is this: for a B2B company that wants to continuously track its visibility, rankings and online presence, a long-term commitment to subscription tools is a costly decision, because the fee grows with the scope of observation, not with the value that knowledge brings to the company.
Tools in this category are offered as SaaS — the company doesn't buy the system, it rents access, paying a recurring fee that depends on the number of seats, the tracking scope and the modules selected. The system runs in the vendor's cloud, and the data collected on rankings, traffic, links and mentions accumulates on its infrastructure.
This model produces a handful of recurring traits that show up in the price lists of all the leading tools — foreign and Polish alike. The fee is charged for the scope of observation — seats, projects, tracked keywords or mention volume — so the total cost depends on how widely the company wants to look. Features are split into package tiers and paid modules, and access to advanced capabilities requires moving up a tier or buying an add-on. Some vendors also bill usage itself — every query and every export consumes allocated credits, and exceeding them triggers an extra charge. Historical data collected, the link index and the mention archive stay with the vendor. Each of these traits sounds neutral on its own. Combined, they add up to a bill that rarely resembles the price shown on the first screen of the price list.
The real cost of off-the-shelf SEO and monitoring tools for a B2B company doesn't depend on a single number, but on the vendor's billing unit and on the number of people and keywords covered by observation. The table below compares three tools as of June 2026 — the amounts are net prices and change over time.
| Tool |
Origin / currency |
Billing model |
Working B2B plan |
What drives the bill up |
| Semrush |
USA / USD |
per plan + per seat + modules |
Guru approx. USD 250/month (approx. PLN 910), 1 user |
every extra seat (+USD 80), add-ons (AI Visibility USD 99, Trends USD 289) |
| Ahrefs |
global / USD |
per plan + query credits |
Standard approx. USD 249/month (approx. PLN 910), 1 user |
credits for queries and exports, additional seats, API (from USD 500) |
| Brand24 |
Poland / USD |
per keyword + mention volume + frequency |
Pro approx. USD 199–349/month (approx. PLN 725–1,275) |
number of keywords, mention limit, update frequency, higher tiers |
Net prices, as of June 2026. All three tools bill in dollars — including the Polish Brand24 — so on top of the cost growing with scope comes exchange-rate fluctuation the company has no control over. Converted at approx. PLN 3.68/USD.
Semrush. The tool bills in dollars, based on plan and number of seats. The Pro plan is USD 139.95 a month, Guru USD 249.95, and Business USD 499.95. Each plan includes one user by default — additional seats cost from USD 45 on the Pro plan, USD 80 on Guru and USD 100 on Business. On top of that come paid modules: AI Visibility for USD 99, Trends for USD 289, local tools for USD 30–60, advertising tools for USD 99. As a result, a five-person team on the Guru plan doesn't pay USD 250 a month, but around USD 6,340 a year — over PLN 23,000 — for licenses alone, before add-ons. The price on the price list is the entry threshold here, not the real cost.
Ahrefs. This tool also bills in dollars: the Lite plan is USD 129 a month, Standard USD 249, Advanced USD 449, and Enterprise from USD 1,499. Each plan includes one user, and additional seats are billed separately. Since 2024, a credit model has applied: every query, data expansion and export consumes allocated credits, whose monthly pool depends on the plan and doesn't roll over to the next period. Exceeding the limit triggers an automatic extra charge. API access requires a separate subscription from USD 500 a month, so under heavy use the bill grows with the number of analyses performed, not with the value they bring.
Brand24. A Polish company with global reach, yet it bills in dollars, not zlotys. The model is based on the number of monitored keywords, the mention limit and the update frequency. The Individual plan at around USD 199 covers only three keywords, two thousand mentions a month and an update every twelve hours. Real monitoring of a brand alongside its competitors requires higher tiers — Pro at USD 199–349 with a dozen or so keywords and real-time data, Business at USD 499–599 with twenty-five keywords and a hundred thousand mentions, and Enterprise from USD 1,499. The wider the scope of observation and the faster the data, the higher the bill. Brand24 also monitors brand visibility in language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which makes the data it collects a resource of growing importance.
The real scale of the cost only shows once you add to the price-list figure what the company actually needs: access for the whole team, more monitored keywords and competitors, and modules that give a fuller picture. The mechanism is the same for all three tools — the bill grows with how much the company wants to know, not with the value of that knowledge.
| Semrush Guru — monthly cost |
Amount |
| Price-list price (1 user) |
approx. PLN 913 (approx. USD 250) |
| Real cost (5-person team) |
approx. PLN 2,081 (approx. USD 570) |
| With add-ons (AI Visibility + Trends) |
approx. PLN 3,497 (approx. USD 958) |
Chart caption: the price-list price covers a single user. Every additional seat and every module push the bill up, and it grows with the scope of observation, not with its value. Billed in dollars, so the PLN cost also fluctuates with the exchange rate; converted at approx. PLN 3.68/USD, as of June 2026.
What the company is actually paying for: credits, limits and overages
Billing models in this category share a trait invisible on the price list: the company doesn't pay for the insight it gains, but for the act of obtaining it. In Ahrefs, every query and every export consumes credits from a monthly pool that doesn't roll over, and exceeding it triggers an automatic extra charge. In Brand24, the limit is the number of mentions the tool collects in a month — once it's exceeded, the company loses part of the picture or has to move to a more expensive tier. In Semrush, the barrier is often the number of seats and modules.
This creates a situation where working more intensively with the tool raises the bill regardless of whether it produced a useful insight. The more the company analyzes, the more competitors it watches and the more often it checks the data, the higher the cost — even though it was precisely that broader and more frequent observation that made it reach for the tool in the first place. The model rewards restraint in using features the company has already paid for.
A Polish vendor doesn't change the model or the currency
Choosing a Polish vendor is sometimes presented as the answer to the drawbacks of foreign tools. In this category, though, it doesn't even solve the currency question. Brand24 is a Polish company with global reach, yet it bills in dollars — just like Semrush and Ahrefs. A Polish client's PLN bill therefore still depends on the dollar exchange rate, a factor that a domestic vendor could have removed, and didn't.
The rest of the model's traits are identical to those of foreign vendors. The fee is charged for the scope of observation — the number of keywords, the mention limit and the data frequency — and grows with it. The data collected on the brand's visibility and its competitors accumulates on the vendor's infrastructure. The tool's Polish origin doesn't change the fact that the company is renting access to someone else's system and handing over data it itself generates through its online presence. The same applies to every subscription vendor in this category, regardless of country of origin.
The cost you don't see on the price list
The most serious cost of off-the-shelf tools never appears on the invoice. It's dependence on a single platform and the lack of control over the data the tool has gathered about the company and its market. It's precisely this layer that turns a pricing decision into a strategic one.
Historical ranking data, the mention archive, built reports and monitoring configurations are created within a structure imposed by the vendor and stored on its infrastructure. The longer the tool is used, the longer the history that accumulates in it, and the more painful its loss becomes on cancellation. Leaving means the continuity of market observation — a time series built over years — gets cut off, because the new vendor starts collecting data from zero. On top of that comes the risk of the vendor's own decisions: price changes, the introduction of credit limits, or the withdrawal of features, as happened with monitoring tools that phased out publishing and response modules mid-subscription. A company using a rented tool has no influence over these decisions, yet bears their consequences.
This creates a situation where the picture of the company's own visibility and its competitors' rankings — knowledge that provides a real edge in sales and marketing efforts — stays stored on the infrastructure of an external party, on terms the vendor dictates.
Data as a strategic resource in the age of AI
Data on search visibility, competitor rankings and brand mentions has taken on a new role — it's fuel for AI tools that analyze trends, detect sudden changes and build a real-time picture of the market. Alongside the classic signals, a new one has appeared: brand presence in the answers of language models such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, which for B2B companies is becoming a metric as measurable as position in organic search results.
In this light, the decision of where market data is stored stops being a technical question. Entrusting it to an external vendor's servers means a resource of growing strategic importance stays outside the company's control, and its continuity depends on the subscription staying active. The conclusion for a company planning its growth concerns the direction, not a specific form. Data on a company's own visibility and market environment is worth treating as a resource that should accumulate on infrastructure the company itself controls.
What changed the calculation: a lower barrier to building software
The case for building your own market-observation tools would have sounded irrational just two years ago. Building a system that collects data on rankings, links and mentions meant a long development project, a high cost for the development team and a delivery time measured in months. For most B2B companies, renting an off-the-shelf tool was the only sensible answer back then.
AI tools supporting software development have changed that calculation. Coding assistants built on large language models cut app-building time many times over, shifting much of the work from manual code writing to design, validation and integration. Work that once required a multi-person team and a schedule measured in months is now delivered by a smaller team in a fraction of that time. The barrier to building a dedicated tool that pulls data from available sources and collects it in-house has dropped enough that, for a growing number of companies, it's no longer a barrier at all.
The change has a second layer. The same AI tools that speed up building the system also become a built-in feature of it. A dedicated monitoring tool gets built faster thanks to AI used as a development tool, and at the same time contains AI running during actual use — for example, scoring the sentiment of mentions, detecting significant changes and summarizing the competitive picture. As a result, the cost-and-time argument that spoke against building your own tool for years has largely stopped holding up.
The alternative to a subscription is a dedicated market-observation system built as a tool the company owns, tailored to what the company actually wants to track, and running on its own infrastructure. The scope of monitored keywords, competitors and sources matches the company's needs, and the data collected accumulates in-house and feeds its other systems. A built-in AI layer handles sentiment scoring, change detection and drafting conclusions.
Fairness requires stating this plainly: such a tool isn't free and doesn't make the company fully independent of external data sources. Some information — ranking data, the link index, or mentions from social platforms — comes from services and APIs that carry their own cost, often billed per query. The difference is in what the company pays for. Instead of a fixed fee for seats, tracked keywords and modules that grows with the scope of observation, the company bears the cost of queries in line with actual use, plus the cost of building and maintaining a tool that belongs to it. Dashboards, analysis logic and the accumulated historical data stay under its control, and the continuity of observation doesn't depend on someone else's subscription staying active. That such a system can be built is shown by working web applications developed with this approach — dedicated tools with their own backend, maintained as company-owned systems rather than extensions of off-the-shelf platforms.
An off-the-shelf SEO or monitoring tool is a rational choice under certain conditions, and this article doesn't claim otherwise. It works well when the scope of observation is small and stable, when it's used by one or two people, when a fast start without a build phase matters, and when the company primarily needs a large, ready-made link index or set of sources that wouldn't make sense to recreate on its own. For an organization like that, a subscription can be the simplest and sufficient answer.
The calculation flips once at least one of the following conditions is met. A growing team uses the tool, so the per-seat model starts working against the company. The scope of observation is broad — many brands, products and competitors — and the per-keyword or per-mention model makes it expensive. The continuity of historical data matters strategically, and losing it when switching vendors is unacceptable. The tool needs to be integrated with the CRM, sales data and the company's other systems as part of a coherent ecosystem. The decision horizon spans several years, and the cost summed over that time exceeds the cost of building your own solution. In these situations, a dedicated tool stops being the more expensive option and becomes the cheaper, more reliable one over the long run.
Subscription SEO and monitoring tools — regardless of whether the vendor is Polish or foreign — lure companies in with a single price-list figure, but at full scale reveal three costs: a fee that grows with the scope of observation — seats, tracked keywords and mentions — extra charges for modules and exceeded credit limits, and dependence on the platform where data about the company's visibility and its market accumulates. In this category, even a Polish vendor bills in dollars, so exchange-rate risk adds to the rising cost. The most serious cost concerns data: in an era of AI's growing role, the picture of a company's own visibility and its competitors' presence remains a valuable asset, and the subscription model keeps it outside the company's control and makes its continuity dependent on the subscription staying active.
Dedicated SEO and monitoring tools built as a system the company owns reverse this logic. The cost of building it and of usage-billed queries replaces a fee that grows with the scope of observation, the data collected stays on the company's own infrastructure, and the tool tracks exactly what matters to it, instead of forcing a fit into someone else's packages. A full description of this approach, along with the company's other dedicated web applications, is available at artechconsult.com/solutions. The starting point for a conversation about your own tool is a free consultation.
The prices quoted in this article come from official vendor price lists and independent pricing analyses as of June 2026, are stated as net prices, and change over time. All three tools bill in dollars, including the Polish Brand24; amounts are given in dollars with the PLN equivalent converted at approx. PLN 3.68/USD, and the PLN bill additionally depends on the current exchange rate. Billing models differ in unit — seat, query credit, keyword or mention — so a direct comparison of amounts requires reference to a specific scope of observation.
