Free vs paid: where the line actually is

What free gets you, completely

• Diagnosis. Our checker scores a page against the same rubric we use in the paid pack. Nothing is held back.
• Every guide on this site. All of it, no email required.
• Implementation on WordPress. Yoast or Rank Math free tiers write your schema.
• Site-wide auditing up to 500 URLs with Screaming Frog.
• Validation via Google's schema validator.
• First-party measurement via Search Console.

If you are willing to do the work yourself, you can reach a high score without paying anyone, including us. That is a deliberate design choice: a free tier that withholds the diagnosis is a lead magnet, not a tool.

The four things money buys

1. Time. The pack writes the JSON-LD, the FAQ schema, the titles and the llms.txt from your actual page content. The work is not hard; it is fiddly and it takes a couple of hours per page done properly.

2. Server-side crawling. Browsers cannot fetch another site's pages, which is why the free checker asks you to paste source. A backend can fetch the URL directly and also inspect robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt automatically. That is a technical constraint, not an artificial limit — see the pack.

3. Competitive data. No free tool gives you reliable share of voice against named competitors. If you need that number, a tracker is the only route.

4. Continuous monitoring. Free tools are point-in-time. Alerting when you drop out of an answer is a paid feature everywhere.

When paying is premature

• You have not fixed what the free checker found.
• You have fewer than ten pages.
• Nobody on the team is accountable for acting on the data.
• Your robots.txt is still blocking crawlers. Fix that first; it costs nothing and nothing else works until you do.

When paying is sensible

• The free fixes are live and you want to know whether they moved anything.
• You have named competitors and a stakeholder asking for a number.
• The implementation work is real but you would rather spend the two hours on your actual business.

We would rather you use the free checker and never pay us than buy a pack you did not need.