SEOTesting: Ditching the Name Sold "2.5 Years' Worth" in 9 Months — Renaming and Rebuilding the Free Tool SanityCheck to $18K MRR and 330 Customers

The product kept pointing in the same direction; only the name and positioning changed, and the slope of the revenue curve changed with them. The story of SEOTesting.com is an unusually clean measured example of that. According to the figures UK developer Nick Swan disclosed on a podcast in September 2022, the business stood at over $18,000 MRR with more than 330 paying customers. The starting point was an internal script written for his own affiliate site.

What makes it worth recording is that this was not a straight line from “built it” to “it grew.” The tool was released free, monetized at $10 a month, ran for years as SanityCheck and stalled, and only found its current curve after a $2,500 domain purchase and a full rebuild. It reads as a record of how far the same functionality can diverge depending on name, price, and target buyer.

The numbers

The difference between a “handy tool” and “the name of a job”

Start with the origin: this was never conceived as a SaaS. Swan was running voucher-code affiliate sites at the time, and wrote a script pulling Search Console data to compare before-and-after results of title and meta changes on his own pages. The first customer was himself, and the demand, “doing this verification by hand is painful”, was proven before anything was released. The free release was just an extension of that confirmation.

The rename from SanityCheck to SEOTesting was less a cosmetic rebrand than an operation that deleted the product’s explanation cost. “SanityCheck” tells you nothing about what the tool does. “SEOTesting” is the exact phrase an SEO professional uses when securing budget. The words a buyer would type when they think “I need a tool for SEO testing” are the domain itself. Seen as a purchase of reduced explanation cost rather than a string of characters, the $2,500 was cheap.

The pricing failure is one Swan names himself: the initial $10 a month was “far too low.” The users are practitioners and agencies who make their living from SEO, and verifying the effect of changes is part of work they bill to clients. Ten dollars a month is the price of a hobbyist’s convenience, not of a tool embedded in a buyer’s billable workflow. The rename and rebuild doubled as a chance to redo the price and the audience.

The foundation is also characteristic: SEOTesting collects no search data of its own and sits as a thin layer on Google Search Console’s official API. When Google extended the available data from 3 to 18 months in January 2018, the tool’s core use case, before/after verification of SEO changes, was lifted by Google’s own data expansion. Building on top of a platform, as with GMass building $130K a month on top of Gmail, externalizes infrastructure cost in exchange for standing permanently downwind of the platform’s spec changes.

Acquisition: community distribution, and the paid channel that worked

Early distribution ran through Facebook groups and Slack communities where SEO practitioners gather. Free tools are strong in that context: as long as no money changes hands, posting one is treated as “sharing,” not “promotion,” and it travels on its own through practitioner communities. The roughly five free months worked simultaneously as functional validation and as the construction of a prospect list for later monetization.

After monetization, the channels Swan credits are word of mouth and, perhaps surprisingly, paid Twitter ads. The SEO industry is densely concentrated on Twitter, so targeting works at the level of a profession. Advertising into a place that is “narrow but reliably populated,” rather than broad and shallow, was one of the few effective paid channels for a niche SaaS. SEObot at $46K MRR, also selling automation in the SEO space, makes a good comparison on the same community-penetration axis.

The stalled 2.5 years, and what didn’t work

The reverse side of this case is the two and a half stalled years as SanityCheck. The functionality was real, free users existed, money was coming in. MRR still stopped at a few thousand dollars. No single cause explains it, but the founder’s own retrospective points to a compound: a name that explained nothing, a $10 price that selected for buyers who choose on cheapness, and part-time operation alongside a day job and other projects.

A mirror-image case is Tracky, a Japanese indie SEO tool that ended in closure. Between “useful as a tool” and “standing as a business” sits a separate job: setting the name, the price, and the audience. SEOTesting paid $2,500 and several months for the decision to redo that configuration, rewriting a working product from scratch and abandoning a name it had spent years building.

As of 2022, Swan had stopped writing code himself. Operations are shared with Phil, a contractor who became the technical co-founder in practice, and Tiago on support and content. The business started solo, but at $18K it is in substance a three-person team.

What transfers, and what doesn’t

Three of the moves carry. One: releasing an internal tool has a higher hit rate because it starts from pre-validated demand. Another: putting “the words of a job that people search for” in the product name can be cheaper marketing than an ad budget. The last: price should be set not by features but by the product’s position inside the buyer’s work, an expensable professional tool or a personal convenience.

The limits deserve equal weight. The post-rename surge coincided with Search Console’s data expansion, a market-side tailwind that cannot be separated out from the rename itself. The “2.5 years in 9 months” comparison also carries over the user base and learning accumulated during the free era. It is not nine months from zero. And the platform risk has not gone anywhere: if Search Console’s specification changes, the core feature gets rebuilt with it. That position is a standing precondition of this business.