I'm launching Plainly.

Today I'm publicly launching Plainly — an SEO platform built for bootstrapped founders, solo entrepreneurs, and indie hackers like me.

This is my second product. The first, Jem Social, is a creator marketplace I've been building since 2022. Plainly is a separate company, separate brand, separate problem — but the reason I built it traces back to the same instinct that started Jem: when the system you need doesn't exist, you build it.

Why I built Plainly

A year into running Jem Social, I was paying $449 a month for SEO software — Ahrefs, Semrush, plus a content optimization tool stacked on top. I used maybe 10% of any of them. The other 90% was dashboards I never opened, reports I never read, and feature breadth designed for marketing agencies billing five clients $2,000 a month each.

I'm not an agency. I'm a founder. The math didn't work.

So I looked for the cheaper alternative. What I found: tools at $19–29/month that either had keyword data that was 30–50% off from the premium tools, or had real data but no workflow opinionation — they'd hand you 1,000 keywords and leave you to figure out which 5 to write about this week.

What I wanted was the workflow I'd built for myself across spreadsheets and tabs, but as an actual product. Real keyword data. Honest competitor analysis in plain English instead of agency jargon. A short list each Monday of what to ship that week. And — most importantly for 2026 — a way to optimize my pages for AI Overview citation, since 48% of Google searches now show AI Overviews and that number is climbing.

That product didn't exist. So I built it.

What Plainly is

Plainly is the SEO tool for founders who'd rather build than babysit dashboards.

It does four things, opinionated:

• Keyword Explorer — DataForSEO-powered research, premium-tool data quality, at one-tenth Ahrefs' price.
• Competitor X-Ray — what's actually working for them, explained without jargon.
• AI Action Plans — the five SEO moves to make this week, ranked by impact.
• Content Briefs — real SERP-based briefs you can hand to a writer (or write yourself in two hours).

Plus a free AI Overview Optimizer that scores any page against the criteria that drive citation in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. No signup. No credit card. Use it right now if you want.

The pricing is what I wished existed when I was paying $449/month:

Free is real free. No trial countdown. No card required. If you outgrow it, you upgrade voluntarily — and you can cancel from a self-service Stripe portal at any time.

Why now

The SEO landscape shifted hard in 2025–2026.

AI Overviews now appear in approximately 48% of US Google searches (and ~70% of B2B technology queries). Click-through rates to traditional ranking results drop 34–61% when an AI Overview appears. 60% of all searches end without a click. The overlap between top-10 rankings and AI Overview citations has collapsed from ~75% in mid-2025 to 17–38% in early 2026.

What that means in plain English: ranking #1 doesn't mean what it used to. The new SEO question isn't "how do I rank?" It's "how do I become the citation source?" Plainly is one of the only tools built around that question explicitly. Most SEO software is still selling the 2020 playbook at 2024 prices.

I built Plainly for the founders who can feel this shift but don't have time to read 15 think-pieces about it.

Who Plainly is for (and who it isn't)

Plainly is for: bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, solopreneurs, bloggers, B2B SaaS founders pre-PMF through ~$100K MRR, content creators, and small teams of 1–5 people doing their own SEO 4–8 hours a week.

Plainly is not for: enterprise marketing teams, agencies managing 50+ client sites, companies that need agency-grade backlink databases for high-DA outreach campaigns. If that's you, Ahrefs is genuinely the better tool — and worth its price tag.

I'm being explicit about who Plainly is not for because I've been on the wrong end of "built for everyone" marketing too many times. A tool that's for everyone is for no one.

What's next

Plainly is live at tryplainly.app as of today. The free tier is open without a credit card. The full SEO workflow starts at $19/month.

I'm building Plainly in public — same as I built Jem Social. Roadmap is public. Pricing decisions are public. The trade-offs I make about what to build and what not to build are public. You can follow along on Twitter or Indie Hackers.

If you're a journalist or creator covering the SEO space, the bootstrapped SaaS movement, or the AI Overview shift in search — I'd love to talk. Email me directly: bree@tryplainly.app.

If you're a founder wondering whether Plainly fits your workflow — try the free tier. Use the 9 free tools. Decide for yourself. That's what they're there for.

If you want to know more about why I build the way I do — about working as a Houston-based, Afro-Latina, queer founder building two separate products from scratch, or about Jem Social, my other product — start here.

The systems we deserve don't always exist yet. Sometimes we have to build them.