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50 Bootstrap SaaS Companies That Will Dominate SEO in 2024
Aug
We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024.
In this article, we focus on bootstrapped companies—those that have never raised outside funding. All SEO data presented here comes straight from the Ahrefs API.
Below is a list of bootstrapped SaaS companies, ranked by estimated monthly organic traffic growth from August 2023 to August 2024. Did you make it to the list?
| Degree | Business | Movement 2023 | Movement 2024 | Traffic growth | Change | Estimated revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Littlepdf | 41,145,810 | 55,455,141 | 14 309 331 | 35% | $17.5 million |
| 2 | BuiltWith | 526 880 | 3 149 986 | 2 623 106 | 498% | $31.0 million |
| 3 | Ahrefs | 2 171 168 | 4 271 413 | 2 100 245 | 97% | $100.0 million |
| 4 | Surfshark | 992 020 | 1 510 739 | 518 719 | 52% | $20.0 million |
| 5 | IPQS | 1 194 124 | 1 660 482 | 466 358 | 39% | $32.0 million |
| 6 | Express VPN | 1 620 815 | 1 927 577 | 306 762 | 19% | $14.9 million |
| 7 | Open weather | 203 917 | 470 687 | 266 770 | 131% | $5.5 million |
| 8 | Clock | 600 071 | 859 005 | 258 934 | 43% | $5.5 million |
| 9 | Bamboo HR | 652,833 | 808 660 | 155 827 | 24% | $237.8 million |
| 10 | Surfer | 45 197 | 189 261 | 144 064 | 319% | $37.5 million |
| 11 | Search engine | 55 317 | 184 746 | 129 429 | 234% | $75.0 million |
| 12 | Oxylabs.io | 92 671 | 207 640 | 114 969 | 124% | $375.0 million |
| 13 | Todoist | 545 900 | 639 398 | 93 498 | 17% | $20.3 million |
| 14 | Switch | 295 570 | 388 062 | 92 492 | 31% | $14.7 million |
| 15 | Jet | 2 712 320 | 2 796 818 | 84 498 | 3% | $252.1 million |
| 16 | Free | 130 940 | 214 538 | 83 598 | 64% | $175.0 million |
| 17 | MX Tool Box | 738 595 | 802,633 | 64 038 | 9% | $9.0 million |
| 18 | TeamGantt | 120 783 | 176 899 | 56,116 | 46% | $5.0 million |
| 19 | Mail trap | 103 564 | 156 873 | 53 309 | 51% | $5.5 million |
| 20 | GetResponse | 192 850 | 243 514 | 50 664 | 26% | $129.2 million |
| 21 | Device Atlas | 59 267 | 109 341 | 50 074 | 84% | $19.0 million |
| 22 | Elven sight | 65 359 | 104 938 | 39 579 | 61% | $8.0 million |
| 23 | Vector Magic | 169 389 | 199 343 | 29 954 | 18% | $10.0 million |
| 24 | Command Factory | 943 | 27 591 | 26 648 | 2826% | $5.5 million |
| 25 | Crowd | 17 602 | 43 155 | 25 553 | 145% | $17.5 million |
| 26 | Kaspr | 10 476 | 33 515 | 23 039 | 220% | $5.5 million |
| 27 | Smart pops | 13 698 | 36 295 | 22 597 | 165% | $3.0 million |
| 28 | ThriftyCal | 11 926 | 33 984 | 22 058 | 185% | $5.5 million |
| 29 | Buy | 37,111 | 58 832 | 21 721 | 59% | $5.5 million |
| 30 | Buzzsprout | 97 961 | 118 040 | 20 079 | 21% | 617 thousand dollars |
| 31 | Conference room 365 | 5,738 | 25 637 | 19 899 | 347% | 500 thousand dollars |
| 32 | Fair | 18 175 | 37 812 | 19 637 | 108% | $75.0 million |
| 33 | Auxiliary juice | 73 249 | 92 177 | 18 928 | 26% | $6.0 million |
| 34 | Yardi | 64,177 | 81 896 | 17 719 | 28% | 5.5 billion dollars |
| 35 | SpyFu | 62 410 | 79 361 | 16 951 | 27% | $2.0 million |
| 36 | Wappalyzer | 61 561 | 78 303 | 16 742 | 27% | 500 thousand dollars |
| 37 | Email file | 142 226 | 158 133 | 15 907 | 11% | $1.0 million |
| 38 | Floating | 29 088 | 44 737 | 15 649 | 54% | $5.5 million |
| 39 | Free Online HTML Editor | 29 523 | 44 269 | 14 746 | 50% | – |
| 40 | BrightLocal 🇺🇦 | 52 853 | 66 876 | 14 023 | 27% | $10.3 million |
| 41 | Short pixel | 6,192 | 20 006 | 13 814 | 223% | $10.0 million |
| 42 | DownloadMyInvoices | 10 880 | 23 767 | 12 887 | 118% | $5.5 million |
| 43 | Mangos | 67 615 | 80 324 | 12 709 | 19% | $5.5 million |
| 44 | Growth Machine | 13 668 | 26 321 | 12 653 | 93% | $5.5 million |
| 45 | I see! | 135 156 | 147 570 | 12 414 | 9% | $100.0 million |
| 46 | GTranslate Inc. | 7,739 | 20 125 | 12 386 | 160% | 5.3 million dollars |
| 47 | Slippery plan | 13 270 | 24 857 | 11 587 | 87% | $1.0 million |
| 48 | Uptime.com | 28 164 | 39 394 | 11 230 | 40% | $5.5 million |
| 49 | Homerun | 23 049 | 33 883 | 10 834 | 47% | $38.4 million |
| 50 | Glass knot | 13 321 | 24,111 | 10 790 | 81% | $5.5 million |
Top 5 Bootstrapping SaaS Companies
For each of the five largest companies, I conducted a five-minute analysis using the Ahrefs tool Site Explorer to understand the SEO strategies that drive their growth.
In low: free tools, programmatic content and content localization play a huge role.
Smallpdf offers free PDF editing and conversion tools. They have an estimated annual revenue of $17,500,000.
| Littlepdf | 2023 | 2024 | Complete change | Percentage change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 41,145,810 | 55,455,141 | 14 309 331 | 34.78% |
| Organic Pages | 3,367 | 3,506 | 139 | 4.13% |
| Keywords organic | 466 048 | 416,115 | -49 933 | -10.71% |
| Keywords in the top three | 54 933 | 69 359 | 14 426 | 26.26% |
Smallpdf’s traffic growth comes entirely from — you guessed it — free PDF tools. Conversion tools (PDF to Word Doc, JPG to PDF, etc.) generate the majority of the site’s traffic:
These free tools target very high-volume keywords such as pdf to word with an estimated 3.9 million searches in Indonesia alone. Here’s real side which works so well:
These tools have also been localized into a variety of languages, with subfolders for Spanish, Indonesian, and Portuguese driving a significant portion of the site’s traffic growth:
BuiltWith is a tool for discovering the technologies that companies exploit to build their websites. BuiltWith has an estimated annual revenue of $31,000,000.
| BuiltWith | 2023 | 2024 | Complete change | Percentage change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 526 880 | 3 149 986 | 2 623 106 | 497.86% |
| Organic Pages | 81 615 | 93 716 | 12 101 | 14.83% |
| Keywords organic | 126 541 | 111 371 | -15,170 | -11.99% |
| Keywords in the top three | 4,538 | 4307 | -231 | -5.09% |
The single biggest driver of growth for BuiltWith is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtz.com/kocontaining localized versions of 191 websites:
Other language subfolders (especially /de, /es and /fr) also generate a lot of traffic:
Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a powerful all-in-one SEO toolkit and the source of all the SEO data in this article.
| Ahrefs | 2023 | 2024 | Complete change | Percentage change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 2 171 168 | 4 271 413 | 2 100 245 | 96.73% |
| Organic Pages | 4,522 | 18,982 | 14 460 | 319.77% |
| Keywords organic | 225 855 | 231 761 | 5,906 | 2.61% |
| Keywords in the top three | 14 291 | 20 618 | 6327 | 44.27% |
No guesswork needed here. Our free AI writing tools are responsible for a vast portion of our organic traffic growth:
Our paragraph rewriting tool (113k monthly visits), paraphrasing tool (99k) and Instagram caption generator (73k) are particularly popular:
Try them out for yourself here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools.
We also launched a programmatic SEO campaign, using Ahrefs data to rank the most popular websites in the world:
Most of the traffic goes to localized versions of these sites, especially in Swedish and French:
Surfshark is a VPN tool with an estimated annual revenue of $20 million.
| Surfshark | 2023 | 2024 | Complete change | Percentage change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 992 020 | 1 510 739 | 518 719 | 52.29% |
| Organic Pages | 2,610 | 3,964 | 1,354 | 51.88% |
| Keywords organic | 205 194 | 248 267 | 43 073 | 20.99% |
| Keywords in the top three | 5,359 | 9390 | 4,031 | 75.22% |
One of the fastest growing sites is Surfshark free ip address checker tool:
Interestingly, most of the company’s organic growth came from branded keywords such as surfshark discount code, surfshark offers, AND surfshark login:
This is a good sign that the company is investing heavily in brand marketing, increasing the number of brand-related queries in search engines.
Looking at Paid Search Ahrefs reports show that the company has launched a significant advertising campaign over the past few months (we registered 876 separate ads):
Gigantic, steep advertising campaigns are not common for companies that profit from their own investments.
While its fundraising data suggests that Surfshark has never raised outside capital, its website states that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Security merged under one holding company, creating a cybersecurity powerhouse that continues to operate independently.”
This might suggest that Surfshark isn’t fully bootstrapped (but I left it at that because it shows an intriguing — and steep — way to escalate organic traffic).
IPQS is a fraud, bot and IP verification tool with an estimated annual revenue of $32 million.
| IPQS | 2023 | 2024 | Complete change | Percentage change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 1 194 124 | 1 660 482 | 466 358 | 39.05% |
| Organic Pages | 22 378 | 31 350 | 8,972 | 40.09% |
| Keywords organic | 72,181 | 75 390 | 3,209 | 4.45% |
| Keywords in the top three | 5,092 | 7,065 | 1,973 | 38.75% |
All of IPQS’s traffic growth (in fact 57% of their total estimated organic traffic) comes from one site, free phone number finder tool:
This page ranks number one for keywords like phone number search (353k searches per month in the US), telephone search (48k) and check this phone (35k):
And this despite having just 84 referring domains and a design that probably looked good circa 2005:
Final Thoughts
We’ll be rolling out more of these types of analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to consider your company for the next round? Just fill out this short Google form.
