# A cheap ASO tool: what it must still do

Sam · Published November 4, 2026 · Canonical: https://rankaso.app/blog/cheap-aso-tool/


A cheap ASO tool is the right choice for an indie developer, as long as cheap means fewer frills and not fewer facts. The facts you need every day are the same at any price: your rank per keyword per storefront, read daily at the same hour; your rivals' ranks from the same search; which words in your listing earn anything; a difficulty reading for each term; alerts on real moves; and your data kept private. Most low-cost tools keep the first and drop the second and third, which are the two that actually change what you do. Here is the list to check against before you pay anything.

![A rival compared keyword by keyword in RankASO, their rank beside yours](https://rankaso.app/assets/device-03.png)

## 1. Daily ranks, per storefront, at the same hour

Weekly checks miss the drop that cost you a week. Blended "global" ranks hide that you are number one in Canada and invisible in the UK. A tool that checks when you open it, rather than at a fixed hour, gives you numbers that drift with your schedule. Cheap must still mean every day, every storefront, same hour. RankASO's free plan does this for one app, 30 keywords and two storefronts.

## 2. Rivals from the same search

This is the one most cheap tools drop, because it looks like a premium feature. It is not. A rival's rank is only comparable to yours if both come from the same result at the same moment. Any tool that reads your rank from a search already has the rival's rank in the same list; charging extra for it is a choice. In RankASO every rival's rank is read from the search that produced yours, and the Gaps list of terms they hold and you do not comes with it.

## 3. The keyword field, word by word

Your listing is a hundred and sixty characters of strategy. A tool that cannot tell you which of those words earn a rank somewhere and which carry nothing leaves you guessing with the most expensive characters you own. The field report and the rule checker that flags duplicates, plurals and ignored words are free in RankASO's Studio.

## 4. Difficulty you can see

A popularity number alone sends you after terms you cannot win. Difficulty read from the apps that hold the top 10 today, with their rating counts visible, is what turns a list into a plan. Cheap must still show you the top 10 and let you judge it.

## 5. Alerts that stay quiet

A daily email with every rank is noise and gets filtered within a week. An alert when you enter or leave the top 10, make a big move, or a rival disappears is signal. If the cheap tier has no alerts, you will stop looking, and a tracker nobody looks at costs the full price of the installs it did not save.

## 6. Your data stays yours

Cheap web tools pay for themselves partly with what their users track. If the plan is free or near free and the tool has an account, your keyword list is the product. RankASO has no account at all; its App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.

## What cheap can legitimately cut

A database of every term in the store, which is research you do twice a year. Thousands of keywords per hour. Team seats. Client reports. Those are what the expensive tiers are for, and a one-off month in one of them, exported and cancelled, covers the research. Tracking what you decided to care about, every day, with rivals and the field report, should not cost more than a coffee a week, and the first app should be free.

RankASO on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6830350753?ct=blog-en-06&mt=8 (Free to start. No account. Data Not Collected.)

## Questions

### Is a free ASO tool good enough?

For one app, yes, if the free plan still does daily ranks per storefront and reads your keyword field. RankASO's free plan does both, plus the rule checker and 90 days of history, with no account.

### What should a paid ASO plan add?

More apps, rivals and gaps, more storefronts, history beyond 90 days, and an optimizer that writes the field from the terms you already win. Not the basic ranks, which should never be the paid part.

### When should an indie developer pay for ASO?

The day you add a second app, a rival or a third storefront. That is where the work scales, and a paywall that appears only at that limit is the honest kind.