2026-08-07

Keysearch pricing 2026: what it costs, and your real cost per keyword

Keysearch is one of the cheaper subscription keyword tools, which is exactly why the per-keyword arithmetic on it is worth doing carefully. A low monthly fee still produces a high cost per keyword if you only open the tool a few times a quarter.

Vendor pricing changes often. The figures below are approximate published list prices at the time of writing and should be verified on the vendor's own pricing page before you buy. The method underneath them stays correct whatever the current number is.

Keysearch plans at a glance

Plan	Approx. monthly	Approx. annual	Daily search limit	Typical fit
Starter	~$17	~$169	Around 200 analyses/day	Solo bloggers, one site
Pro	~$34	~$279	Around 500 analyses/day	Multiple sites, client work

Two things are notable about how this is structured. First, the annual plans discount meaningfully — roughly two to four months free depending on tier. Second, the limits are daily, not monthly, which is unusual in this category and matters more than it looks.

Why a daily limit changes the maths

A daily cap doesn't roll over. If your research is bursty — and for most solo operators it is — you can hit the Starter ceiling on the one day a month you actually sit down to plan content, while the other 29 days of allowance evaporate unused.

Concretely: Starter at roughly 200 analyses per day is about 6,000 a month on paper. If you use it on three days a month and hit the cap each time, your real consumption is 600. You paid for 6,000.

This isn't a criticism specific to Keysearch — every subscription has this shape. It's just more visible when the limit is daily, and it's the single biggest driver of the gap between advertised value and delivered value.

Your real cost per keyword

The calculation that cuts through any pricing page:

Cost per keyword = annual fee ÷ keywords you actually check in a year

Run it against the Starter plan at roughly $169/year:

Keywords checked per year	Real cost per keyword	Verdict
100	~$1.69	Badly overpaying
300	~$0.56	Overpaying
1,000	~$0.17	Reasonable
3,000	~$0.06	Good value
10,000+	~$0.02	Excellent value

And against Pro at roughly $279/year:

Keywords checked per year	Real cost per keyword
500	~$0.56
2,000	~$0.14
10,000	~$0.03
30,000	~$0.01

The crossover sits somewhere around 2,000–3,000 keywords a year, which is roughly 10 keywords every working day. Above that, Keysearch pricing is genuinely good value and this article is telling you to buy it. Below it, you're paying a subscription rate for burst usage.

What you get for the money

Keysearch bundles more than keyword data: difficulty scoring, volume, competitor analysis, a rank tracker, backlink checking, content assistance and YouTube research sit inside the same fee. Whether that bundle is value or overhead is the whole question.

It's value if you're actively tracking rankings for a portfolio of sites and doing competitor teardowns regularly. Buying those separately costs more than $34/month.
It's overhead if you open the tool to answer one question — is this list of keywords winnable — and ignore the other eight features. Then you're funding a suite to use a calculator.

Honest comparison

Keysearch is a good product at a fair subscription price, and if you research daily it's among the better value options in the category. Two situations where it isn't the right purchase:

You research in bursts. Pre-launch, monthly content planning, quarterly reviews. The daily-cap structure punishes this pattern specifically, and the annual fee divided by your genuine usage lands north of $0.50 per keyword. Pay-as-you-go credits cost roughly $0.05–$0.06 per keyword with no reset date, which is 10× cheaper for this usage shape.

You only need difficulty and volume. If rank tracking, backlinks and YouTube research are things you'll never open, the bundle is working against you. A dedicated checker does the one job for a fraction of the price.

Conversely, if you're checking 10+ keywords most working days and you'd otherwise be paying separately for rank tracking, Keysearch is cheaper than the alternatives and you should stop reading comparison articles and buy it.

The pay-as-you-go alternative

AffordableKeywords does the narrow version of the job: paste a list, get keyword difficulty and search volume back, pay per keyword checked. Roughly $0.05–$0.06 per keyword, no subscription, no daily cap, credits that don't expire.

It does not do rank tracking, backlinks, competitor analysis or content briefs. If you need those, Keysearch is the better buy and the honest recommendation. If you don't, run the division above against your real annual usage before committing to any monthly fee.

FAQ

How much does Keysearch cost?

Approximately $17/month for the Starter plan and $34/month for Pro at the time of writing, with annual billing discounting to roughly $169 and $279 per year respectively. Verify current pricing on the vendor site, as these figures change.

Does Keysearch have a free plan?

Keysearch has historically offered a limited free trial with a small number of daily searches rather than a permanent free tier. Check the vendor's current terms, since trial structures in this category change frequently.

Is Keysearch cheaper than Ahrefs or Semrush?

Substantially, yes. Keysearch sits in the $17–$34/month band while the major suites typically start around $99–$139/month. The data depth and index size differ correspondingly — you're trading breadth for price.

What is my real cost per keyword on Keysearch?

Divide the annual fee by the number of keywords you genuinely check in a year. At roughly $169/year, checking 300 keywords costs about $0.56 each, while checking 3,000 costs about $0.06 each. The break-even against pay-as-you-go pricing sits near 2,000–3,000 keywords per year.

Are Keysearch limits daily or monthly?

Daily. Allowance does not roll over, so unused capacity on quiet days is lost. This makes the plan a poor fit for research that happens in concentrated bursts a few times a month.