The free SEO audit API tier on SEO Score API is 2 audits per day, no credit card. That's the honest number — not a 14-day trial, not a "free forever" with the useful parts gated off. Two real audits, every day, with the full 82-check response shape.

This post is the honest evaluation of what you can actually build inside that limit, and where you'll hit the wall. We get asked this enough that it's worth writing down instead of repeating in every demo call.

What 2 audits a day is actually enough for

Evaluating the API. Two audits is enough to inspect the response shape, write a few lines of code against it, and decide whether to upgrade. That's the explicit purpose of the free tier — we'd rather you spend a week kicking the tires than sign up for a paid plan you don't end up using.

A personal site monitor. If you have one personal site or portfolio you want to audit before every deploy, two audits a day is more than enough. Most personal sites deploy weekly at most. You'll have ~12 unused audits a week.

A side-project status badge. Want to put an SVG score badge on a side-project README? One audit a week keeps it fresh. The free tier covers that for free, forever.

Learning the product. Two audits a day is enough to read through a full response, understand the check IDs, build a small Jinja template that renders it, and ship a tiny tool. That's a useful weekend project regardless of whether you ever pay.

Where the wall is

Anything CI-driven. A real CI pipeline runs more than 2 builds a day. The moment you wire SEO Score API into GitHub Actions and start opening PRs, you'll burn through the daily limit by mid-morning. CI workflows need the Starter tier ($5/mo, 200 audits) at minimum.

Any agency or client work. If you're auditing client sites, you're auditing more than one site. You're also auditing more than once. Two audits a day doesn't survive contact with a single client. Agencies belong on Basic ($15/mo, 1,000 audits) or Pro ($39/mo, 5,000).

Batch audits. The /audit/batch endpoint isn't even available on the free tier. Batches are explicitly a paid feature because they're an order of magnitude more expensive to run.

Anything with monitoring. SEO monitoring is by definition recurring. Two audits a day might cover one URL audited every 12 hours, but that's it. Real monitoring across a list of pages needs Starter or above.

What's gated vs. what isn't

People often assume the free tier is a stripped-down response. It isn't. On the free tier you get:

  • All 82 checks (same as paid)
  • Overall score, category sub-scores, per-check results (same)
  • AI Readability score (same)
  • The hosted report URL and the SVG badge (same)
  • All SDKs — Python, Node, n8n, GitHub Action (same)

What you don't get on free:

  • SXO / AEO / AIO scores (Starter+)
  • Score history (Starter has 30 days, Basic 90, Pro 365, Ultra unlimited)
  • GEO checks (Basic+)
  • Competitive audits (Pro+)
  • Batch endpoint (Starter+)
  • Email/Slack alerts on monitor regressions (Starter+)

The free tier is the full audit response with two rate limits: 2 per day, 2 per minute. Everything else is paid.

Why not 5 or 10 a day?

Honest answer: each audit costs us real compute. We render the page in headless Chromium, hit external APIs for performance data, run 82 checks. That's not free for us. Two per day lets anyone evaluate the API without putting us out of business if a few thousand people sign up next week.

Some free SEO API tiers in the market quote bigger numbers (10/day, 25/day) but they're shallow — they don't render JavaScript, they don't run accessibility checks, they cap the response payload. We'd rather give you two real audits than ten that don't tell you anything about the API you'd actually be paying for.

What to do if you hit the limit and aren't ready to pay

If you've burned both audits and you just need to check one more thing, the public live demo at the homepage renders a (gated) audit for any URL with no key required — IP-rate-limited at 3/hour. That's the right escape hatch for "I just want to see one more result before bed."

If you're hitting the limit consistently, that's the signal to upgrade. Starter at $5/mo for 200 audits is roughly the cost of one coffee a month and turns "I have to budget my audits" into "I never think about my budget." That's the whole pricing thesis.

The signup flow

Email + 6-digit code, takes under 30 seconds, no credit card. You get the key on screen and via email. Run your first audit:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://seoscoreapi.com/audit?url=https://example.com"

If the response shape works for your use case, great — you've validated the API for free. If it doesn't, you've also validated it for free, and we've saved each other a sales call.