Marketing tools I'd use before paying for another subscription
Ads run by Claude, an open-source Semrush alternative, self-hosted email, lead-gen scraping and page-change alerts.
Marketing software is where SaaS bills add up fastest: one tool for SEO, one for email, one for ads, one for competitor tracking. These are the links I saved this month that cover the same ground for much less.
Ads and SEO
Claude Ads is a skill for Claude Code that runs paid-media work across a dozen ad platforms: Google, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok and more. It's the closest thing I've seen to a small marketing agency living in your terminal. Audits, campaign structure and reporting, driven by prompts.
OpenSEO (openseo.so) is an open-source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs. Keyword research and site analysis without a three-figure monthly plan.
Okara is an AI marketing tool. Useful when you need a marketing assistant that drafts and plans campaigns, not just another analytics dashboard.
Listmonk is a self-hosted newsletter and mailing-list manager. It's a single binary, very fast, and pairs with any SMTP provider (SES, Postmark, etc.). For a newsletter or transactional campaigns it replaces Mailchimp at a fraction of the cost.
Leads and competitor watching
Scrapling is an adaptive web-scraping framework. It handles anything from a single page to a full crawl, and its selectors adapt when a site's layout changes. For lead generation, pulling public directories into a sheet becomes a short script. (Scrape responsibly: respect robots.txt and the site's terms.)
changedetection.io watches web pages and pings you when they change. Point it at a competitor's pricing page, a job board or a tender listing and get a notification instead of checking manually.
How I'd combine them
OpenSEO to find what to write about, Listmonk to send it, Claude Ads to put budget behind what works, changedetection.io to keep an eye on competitors, Scrapling to build the outreach list. Five tools, mostly self-hosted, most of a growth stack.