Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Ben Senescu, founder of OpenSEO · Recorded August 13, 2026
I have been in SEO SaaS since Raven Tools brought me out of Homes.com to Tennessee. I have watched a lot of good tools die in the crib against the same wall: the $99 a month price point. Get anywhere near it and the first question is “is that already in Semrush?” The second is “do I pay for this on top of Semrush?” You either stay tiny or you go enterprise.
Ben Senescu walked around the wall instead of into it.
He was not an SEO. That is the point.
Ben is a software engineer. He wanted to market his own open source projects, went looking for tools, and found them bloated and priced past what a solopreneur would pay. Then he noticed something on Reddit.
“I found out that lots of people were vibe coding their own dashboards around this API called DataForSEO. So I asked them, hey, would you guys like it if there was an open source project that you could start from for building your dashboards?”
He posted the question in r/TechSEO, got a yes, and shipped the first version in a week. That was February. Listen to the full conversation above.
Open source does not mean free
This is the objection every professional SEO raises first, and Ben answers it head on. OpenSEO is $10 a month, or you bring your own DataForSEO key.
“The biggest gotcha when I say it’s an open source SEO tool is professional SEOs asking, but what about the data? Because everyone knows the data is really expensive. So that data costs money, and how we make money is we charge a little fee on top of the data you use.”
The agency math is the interesting part. Most customers never pass $10. An agency with a hundred clients might get to fifty, because projects are unlimited and you pay for consumption rather than seats.
The surprise in his customer list
Here is the finding I did not expect, and the one worth sitting with if you build anything in this space.
“A lot of the people who are paying for the hosted solution of OpenSEO aren’t professional SEOs. They aren’t comparing against Semrush, because they’ve never used Semrush before. It was totally inaccessible to them at that price point.”
The Reddit thread that started it was full of professional SEOs wanting a customizable tool. The people who actually pay are somebody else entirely. And price was only half the barrier.
“It’s really hard to do SEO. It took lots of time. You need to spend like 10, 20 hours a week doing it. But now these people are able to start dipping their toes into SEO with Claude. So an affordable SEO tool didn’t make any sense before, because you were going to spend so much time doing it anyway.”
That is the actual unlock, and it is not the pricing. A cheap tool was pointless while the labour cost was twenty hours a week. Drop the labour cost and a cheap tool suddenly has a market that never existed. I have felt this from the inside this year, going from Claude in a browser to Claude Desktop to running things in the terminal, and the jump in what one person can execute is not incremental.
Sixty pull requests and the discipline to say no
The most transferable idea in the episode has nothing to do with SEO. OpenSEO got popular, and popularity arrived as sixty open pull requests from strangers.
“I had to just declare bankruptcy on addressing those. I’m sure most of the PRs are really good, but I can’t just add a hundred things to the app all at once, because I’m certain even if only one of them breaks, how do you track that all down?”
Then the line that explains the whole era:
“I could probably implement every feature in Semrush in three weeks with Claude Code, but they’d all be so slightly broken that it would just be impossible to fix. I think that’s the biggest thing in the AI era, figuring out: I can do anything. What’s the one thing I should do?”
Capability stopped being the constraint. Judgment is the constraint. Anyone can now generate more work than they can verify, and the failure mode is not a broken build, it is a hundred things that are subtly wrong at once.
His read on domain rating
Coming in fresh, without a decade of received opinion, Ben looks at DR the way a normal person would.
“A lot of people want to increase their domain rating, entrepreneurs especially, because that’s what everyone talks about and what companies are marketing. Like, we’ll buy you all these backlinks to increase your domain rating. But is that going to get you any organic traffic?”
An entire industry sells against a third-party metric that no search engine uses. It takes a newcomer to ask the obvious question out loud. Worth reading next to vetting links by relevance rather than DA.
What is actually unsolved
Ben is clear about where the map ends.
“With the traditional SEO stuff, it’s pretty clear what I should be building. Keyword research is essentially a solved problem, backlinks you just show the backlinks. With GEO, it seems like there’s a lot less definitive answer on how it works.”
I pushed on how little data any of us have. There is nothing from Google on AI Overviews impact or click-through. Microsoft Clarity added query fan-out visualization and Bing Webmaster Tools added a little. Whoever is running ChatGPT ads is presumably seeing numbers, and it is all under NDA. We are marketing in the dark.
Ben’s answer to that is the same answer Ann Smarty arrived at from a completely different direction:
“At the end of the day it’s just, are you doing good marketing? Are you communicating your brand properly? If you kind of just put blinders on, I think it will work out in the end.”
And the thing he says SEO gave him, which is the best case for the discipline I have heard from someone who only just joined it:
“I think the SEO way of thinking about what are people searching for, what are people asking, is just so useful as a framework to view how you should be talking about your brand. So even if maybe SEO changes a lot, I think that whole framework of looking at things is extremely useful.”
Horizontal, not deep
I asked where he takes it over the next year. He is going wide on purpose: local SEO, better AI visibility, prompt tracking. Not deeper analysis.
“OpenSEO will be more like your source of truth for all data, the place we’re storing your rank tracking, your prompt tracking, kind of the brain for your Claude. And then if you want to pull in other more advanced SEO analysis tools, you can go to other tools for that.”
That is a real position, and a rare one. Be the data layer, keep the door open for the first-timer who cannot afford a consultant yet, and let other products fight over the clever analysis on top.
Connect with Ben
- OpenSEO: openseo.so
- LinkedIn: Ben Senescu
- X: @bensenescu
- Best way to contribute right now: write really good issues, and help people in the Discord
🎧 Listen: Ben Senescu on Open Source SEO and the $99 Ceiling | 📺 Watch: on YouTube
Ben’s backlog decision is written up as the SEO SOP: Decide the One Thing to Ship Next — plus a one-page PDF, free inside The Vault.
