It was a Tuesday night, maybe 11pm. I was trying to figure out whether a new analytics tool was eating into my product's market before I committed to a feature sprint. I opened SimilarWeb, punched in the domain, and hit the paywall. $125 per month. Not per report — per month.
I closed the tab.
Here's the thing: I don't need SimilarWeb every day. I'm not a market research firm. I'm one person trying to answer one question — is this competitor actually growing, and what are they doing to grow? — maybe once a month, twice if I'm in a busy research phase. Paying $125 for that feels like renting a forklift to move a couch.
So I built a different workflow. It costs me about $5 per serious competitor deep-dive, takes about 2-3 hours off my week, and honestly surfaces the signals I care about more reliably than the expensive tools do.
The setup: what I actually need to know
When I'm evaluating a competitor, I'm not trying to build a consulting deck. I'm trying to answer a small number of questions fast:
- Are they actually getting traffic, or are they just loud on Twitter?
- What's their SEO footprint — do they have content working for them?
- Have they raised money or had a big launch recently that would distort their numbers?
- What are users saying they hate about it?
- What does their pricing page look like, and has it changed?
Five questions. Everything else is noise I'll read for 20 minutes and forget.
Step one: the 60-second snapshot
I built analook.com for exactly this — I was tired of having the same problem every month, opening 8 different tabs to stitch together a picture that should take 60 seconds to see.
I put in a competitor's domain. In about a minute I get: estimated monthly traffic and its trend, top traffic sources (organic vs. paid vs. direct), their top SEO keywords, Product Hunt launch history, GitHub repo stats if they have one, and their current pricing tiers.
That last part — pricing history via Wayback Machine snapshots — is more useful than it sounds. If a tool went from $29/month to $49/month in the last six months, that tells me something. Either they found their price floor, or they're getting desperate, or they repositioned upmarket. You can't tell which just from the number, but it's a thread worth pulling.
The report costs $2.99. That's the $5 workflow — usually two reports per deep-dive, sometimes three if I'm comparing options.
What I actually dig into
The snapshot gives me the lay of the land. Then I pick one or two signals to go deeper on, not all of them.
Product Hunt history is underrated. A tool that launched 18 months ago with 800 upvotes and then... nothing since. No new products, no updates posted, no community comments. That's a signal. Either they got acquired, ran out of steam, or pivoted entirely. Compare that to a tool that launches something new every few months — they're still iterating, still trying to find the angle that works.
I check this manually: I search their maker profile on Product Hunt and look at the timeline. Five minutes. Free.
The pricing page on Wayback Machine is my favorite free signal. Go to web.archive.org, put in competitor.com/pricing, and look at snapshots from 6, 12, 18 months ago. Did they add an enterprise tier? Did they kill the free plan? Did they raise prices and quietly add a "grandfathered" plan for existing users? Pricing page changes are a window into what's actually working for a business — companies don't change pricing pages randomly.
SEO keyword clusters in the Analook report tell me whether they're playing the same game I'm playing. If their top organic terms are all high-intent product keywords (e.g., "competitor analysis tool for startups"), they're fighting for the same searchers I am. If they're ranking for informational terms two levels up the funnel, they're playing a different acquisition game and we're not actually competing on that channel.
$5 vs. $125: honest comparison
Let me be fair about what you're actually trading off.
SimilarWeb at $125/month gives you more accurate traffic estimates — especially for large sites with millions of monthly visitors. It gives you historical trend data going back years, not months. It gives you audience overlap data that's genuinely hard to replicate. If you're doing M&A due diligence or a serious market sizing exercise for investors, it's worth it.
What $5 of Analook reports gives you is: good enough traffic direction (is this thing growing or shrinking, roughly what order of magnitude), the SEO keyword picture, the Product Hunt and GitHub story, and the pricing snapshot. For a solo founder trying to decide whether to build a feature or pivot away from a competitor's turf, that's usually enough.
The honest version: SimilarWeb is better data. Analook is faster and cheaper for the questions I'm actually asking. I don't need 99% confidence on whether a competitor has 50K or 80K monthly visitors. I need to know if they're in the same league as me or five leagues ahead — and which direction they're trending.
For most competitor checks I do, the $5 version answers the question.
What this workflow actually saved me
A few months ago I was about to spend a week building an SEO content module for my product. Before committing, I ran a competitor check — specifically looking at whether the main tools in my space were ranking for the terms I was targeting or whether there was a gap.
What I found: two direct competitors had almost no content footprint. Their traffic was almost entirely direct and referral. That told me SEO wasn't their bet, which could mean either (a) they tried and it didn't work, or (b) they just hadn't invested there. I checked their Product Hunt history — both had launched in the last 18 months, so they were relatively new. Their pricing pages hadn't changed, which suggests no major repositioning.
Conclusion: the SEO gap wasn't because the market couldn't support it. It was just untouched.
I built the content module. It's been worth it. The whole research session took maybe two hours, including the Analook reports and manual digging.
That's the workflow. Not revolutionary. No AI magic. Just: fast snapshot, pick the most interesting signal, go deeper on that one thing, write a one-paragraph conclusion, move.
I do this maybe twice a month. It's saved me from building the wrong thing at least twice. At $5 a session, the ROI is embarrassing.
If you want to try the workflow, analook.com has a free tier — 2 reports/month, no credit card.
