50 Bootstrapped SaaS Companies Dominating SEO in 2024

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’re focusing on bootstrapped software companies—those who have never raised external funding. All SEO data featured here comes piping hot from the Ahrefs API.

This is a list of bootstrapped SaaS companies ordered by estimated monthly organic traffic growth from August 2023 to August 2024. Did you make the cut?

Rank	Company	Traffic 2023	Traffic 2024	Traffic Growth	Change	Estimated Revenue
1	Smallpdf	41,145,810	55,455,141	14,309,331	35%	$17.5M
2	BuiltWith	526,880	3,149,986	2,623,106	498%	$31.0M
3	Ahrefs	2,171,168	4,271,413	2,100,245	97%	$100.0M
4	Surfshark	992,020	1,510,739	518,719	52%	$20.0M
5	IPQS	1,194,124	1,660,482	466,358	39%	$32.0M
6	ExpressVPN	1,620,815	1,927,577	306,762	19%	$14.9M
7	OpenWeather	203,917	470,687	266,770	131%	$5.5M
8	Clockify	600,071	859,005	258,934	43%	$5.5M
9	BambooHR	652,833	808,660	155,827	24%	$237.8M
10	Surfer	45,197	189,261	144,064	319%	$37.5M
11	Doofinder	55,317	184,746	129,429	234%	$75.0M
12	Oxylabs.io	92,671	207,640	114,969	124%	$375.0M
13	Todoist	545,900	639,398	93,498	17%	$20.3M
14	Toggl	295,570	388,062	92,492	31%	$14.7M
15	JetBrains	2,712,320	2,796,818	84,498	3%	$252.1M
16	Zadarma	130,940	214,538	83,598	64%	$175.0M
17	MXToolbox	738,595	802,633	64,038	9%	$9.0M
18	TeamGantt	120,783	176,899	56,116	46%	$5.0M
19	Mailtrap	103,564	156,873	53,309	51%	$5.5M
20	GetResponse	192,850	243,514	50,664	26%	$129.2M
21	DeviceAtlas	59,267	109,341	50,074	84%	$19.0M
22	Elfsight	65,359	104,938	39,579	61%	$8.0M
23	Vector Magic	169,389	199,343	29,954	18%	$10.0M
24	Referral Factory	943	27,591	26,648	2826%	$5.5M
25	Crowdin	17,602	43,155	25,553	145%	$17.5M
26	Kaspr	10,476	33,515	23,039	220%	$5.5M
27	Wisepops	13,698	36,295	22,597	165%	$3.0M
28	SavyCal	11,926	33,984	22,058	185%	$5.5M
29	Voucherify	37,111	58,832	21,721	59%	$5.5M
30	Buzzsprout	97,961	118,040	20,079	21%	$617K
31	Meeting Room 365	5,738	25,637	19,899	347%	$500K
32	vFairs	18,175	37,812	19,637	108%	$75.0M
33	Helpjuice	73,249	92,177	18,928	26%	$6.0M
34	Yardi	64,177	81,896	17,719	28%	$5.5B
35	SpyFu	62,410	79,361	16,951	27%	$2.0M
36	Wappalyzer	61,561	78,303	16,742	27%	$500K
37	Filemail	142,226	158,133	15,907	11%	$1.0M
38	Float.com	29,088	44,737	15,649	54%	$5.5M
39	Free online HTML editor	29,523	44,269	14,746	50%	–
40	BrightLocal 🇺🇦	52,853	66,876	14,023	27%	$10.3M
41	ShortPixel	6,192	20,006	13,814	223%	$10.0M
42	GetMyInvoices	10,880	23,767	12,887	118%	$5.5M
43	Mangools	67,615	80,324	12,709	19%	$5.5M
44	La Growth Machine	13,668	26,321	12,653	93%	$5.5M
45	Aha!	135,156	147,570	12,414	9%	$100.0M
46	GTranslate Inc.	7,739	20,125	12,386	160%	$5.3M
47	Slickplan	13,270	24,857	11,587	87%	$1.0M
48	Uptime.com	28,164	39,394	11,230	40%	$5.5M
49	Homerun	23,049	33,883	10,834	47%	$38.4M
50	Glassnode	13,321	24,111	10,790	81%	$5.5M

Top 5 bootstrapped SaaS companies

For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand the SEO strategies driving their growth.

In a nutshell: free tools, programmatic content, and content localization feature heavily.

Smallpdf offers free tools for editing and converting PDF files. They have an estimated annual revenue of $17,500,000.

Smallpdf	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	41,145,810	55,455,141	14,309,331	34.78%
Organic pages	3,367	3,506	139	4.13%
Organic keywords	466,048	416,115	-49,933	-10.71%
Keywords in top 3	54,933	69,359	14,426	26.26%

Smallpdf’s traffic growth comes entirely from—you guessed it—free PDF tools. Conversion tools (converting from PDF to Word Doc, from JPG to PDF, and so on) drive the majority of the site’s traffic:

These free tools target extremely high volume keywords, like pdf to word with an estimated 3.9M searches in Indonesia alone. Here’s the actual page that ranks so well:

These tools have also been localized to different languages, with the Spanish-, Indonesian- and Portuguese-targeted subfolders generating a large portion of the website’s traffic growth:

BuiltWith is a tool for discovering the technologies companies use to use to build their websites. BuiltWith has an estimated annual revenue of $31,000,000.

BuiltWith	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	526,880	3,149,986	2,623,106	497.86%
Organic pages	81,615	93,716	12,101	14.83%
Organic keywords	126,541	111,371	-15,170	-11.99%
Keywords in top 3	4,538	4,307	-231	-5.09%

The biggest single driver of BuiltWith’s growth is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtwith.com/ko, housing localized versions of 191 website pages:

Other language subfolders (particularly /de, /es, and /fr) also generate a decent amount of traffic:

Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a powerful all-in-one SEO toolset, and the source of all the SEO data in this article.

Ahrefs	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	2,171,168	4,271,413	2,100,245	96.73%
Organic pages	4,522	18,982	14,460	319.77%
Organic keywords	225,855	231,761	5,906	2.61%
Keywords in top 3	14,291	20,618	6,327	44.27%

We don’t need conjecture here. Our free AI writing tools are responsible for a big part of our organic traffic growth:

Our paragraph rewriter (113k visits per month), paraphrasing tool (99k), and instagram caption generator (73k) are particularly popular:

Try them out for yourselves here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools.

We also launched a programmatic SEO campaign, using Ahrefs data to rank the world’s most popular websites:

The localized versions of these pages—particularly Swedish and French—account for the majority of the traffic:

Surfshark is a VPN tool with an estimated annual revenue of $20,000,000.

Surfshark	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	992,020	1,510,739	518,719	52.29%
Organic pages	2,610	3,964	1,354	51.88%
Organic keywords	205,194	248,267	43,073	20.99%
Keywords in top 3	5,359	9,390	4,031	75.22%

One of Surfshark’s fastest-growing pages is a free IP address checking tool:

But interestingly, most of the company’s organic growth has come from branded keywords, like surfshark discount code, surfshark deals, and surfshark login:

This is a good indication that the company has been investing heavily in brand marketing, increasing branded search queries as a byproduct.

Looking at the Paid search reports in Ahrefs, we can see that the company launched a substantial advertising campaign in the last couple of months (we’ve logged 876 separate ads):

Big, expensive brand advertising campaigns are not common for bootstrapped companies.

Although the fundraising data suggests that Surfshark has never raised outside capital, their website shares that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Security merged under one holding company to form a cybersecurity powerhouse while still operating independently.”

This suggests that Surfshark may not be bootstrapped in the truest sense (but I’ve left it in because it showcases an interesting—and expensive—way to grow organic traffic).

IPQS is a fraud, bot detection, and IP validation tool with an estimated annual revenue of $32,000,000.

IPQS	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	1,194,124	1,660,482	466,358	39.05%
Organic pages	22,378	31,350	8,972	40.09%
Organic keywords	72,181	75,390	3,209	4.45%
Keywords in top 3	5,092	7,065	1,973	38.75%

All of IPQS’ traffic growth (and in fact, 57% of their total estimated organic traffic) comes from a single page, a free tool for looking up phone numbers:

This page manages to rank in first place for keywords like phone number lookup (353K monthly searches in the US), phone lookup (48K), and check this phone (35K):