The cheapest keyword research tool a Singapore buyer can actually run, priced per credit rather than per month

The cheapest real paid keyword research tool we could read a price for on 28 October 2026 is Keywords Everywhere, published at USD 7 a month billed annually, which its own pricing page states as "$84 billed annually" for 100,000 credits a year, where "One credit gets you the volume, cpc, competition & 12 month trend data for one keyword." That works out at roughly USD 0.00084 a keyword, and the credits are "valid for one year from the date of purchase". No other vendor in the budget band published a lower figure we could read.

The more useful finding is about the band rather than the winner. Of six low cost keyword tools checked, three served no price at all: Mangools, LowFruits and Ubersuggest each returned a working page with the plan structure described and the figures injected by script rather than written into the document. So at the cheap end of this category, price is the hardest attribute to establish, which is exactly backwards from how a budget purchase should work. Below is what each vendor did publish, with the page and the date, and then the two checks that decide whether a cheap tool is worth anything to a Singapore buyer at all.

What each budget vendor published on 28 October 2026

Two method notes, because both would otherwise produce a wrong answer. LowFruits returned HTTP 403 to one fetching route and HTTP 200 with the full page to a plain browser request on the same day, so the correct reading is from the body rather than from the status code. And three of the paths that look obvious are not the real ones: mangools.com/pricing, seranking.com/prices.html and neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/pricing/ all returned HTTP 404, two of them carrying a fully styled page of several hundred kilobytes. A styled page is not a page that exists. Check the status code, not the body size.

The arithmetic that makes a credit price comparable to a subscription

A monthly fee and a credit pack are not comparable until you convert both to a cost per keyword looked up, and doing that reorders the table.

• Keywords Everywhere Bronze: USD 84 a year for 100,000 credits is about USD 0.00084 a keyword, with each credit returning volume, cost per click, competition and a twelve month trend. For somebody checking a few thousand keywords a year, the annual cost is a rounding error.
• Moz Pro Standard: USD 950 for a year at the yearly rate, including 150 keyword queries a month, which is 1,800 a year. That is about USD 0.53 a query. The subscription is buying rank tracking, crawling and link data as well, so the comparison is not like for like, and if keyword lookups are what you want, the per lookup figure is the one that tells you so.
• SE Ranking: at USD 103.20 a month the headline unit is 2,000 keywords tracked daily, which is monitoring a fixed list rather than researching a new one. Its page does state unlimited keyword, competitor and backlink research on that tier, which is a genuinely different model from a credit pool.

So the budget question splits cleanly in two, and most buyers have only one of the two problems. If you need to look up many keywords occasionally, buy credits. If you need to watch a fixed list of keywords every day, buy a tracker. Paying a tracker subscription to do research, or buying credits to do monitoring, is the expensive mistake in this band and it is easy to make because every vendor describes itself as both.

The two checks that matter more than the price, if you are buying from Singapore

First, can the tool select Singapore, and does it say so? A keyword tool that cannot report a Singapore geography is worth nothing here at any price, and the only honest way to check is to run one query on a free tier or a trial and look at the location selector before you pay. Singapore is a small market, and the figure a tool shows you by default is very often a global or United States number that is many times larger than the real local demand. A plan bought on the strength of an impressive volume figure that turns out to be worldwide is a plan built on a number that does not exist in your market.

Second, does the figure you are reading cover one group or several phrasings? Google Keyword Planner reports one figure per normalised group, and most tools downstream of it inherit that behaviour. The practical consequence is the single most expensive misreading in this subject: four phrasings that all belong to one group, each showing 10 searches a month, are one opportunity worth 10, not four opportunities worth 40. We have measured that on our own planning data and it overstated individual rows by a hundred per cent. If two phrasings return the same volume and the same grouped figure, treat them as one group until something proves otherwise.

Both of those checks are free, and either one of them will save you more than the difference between the cheapest two tools on the table.

Start free, and buy when you hit a named ceiling

Before any of the paid tiers above, there is a free layer that answers more than most people expect. Google Keyword Planner is free with an Ads account and gives Google's own grouped demand estimate for a geography you select. Search Console tells you the queries your own pages already appear for, with no keyword limit, because it reports what happened rather than answering a lookup. The search box and its suggestions carry no ceiling and need no account. Our page on the free keyword tools compared, with the published limit on each free tier sets out what each one is counting and where each one stops, which is the right thing to read before you spend USD 84.

The one thing no free tier answers is which keywords a specific competitor ranks for, in depth, with their pages attached, because free tiers restrict third party index tools to properties you can prove you own. That is the honest reason to pay somebody in this category, and one concentrated month of a mid tier plan usually answers it. Buying a cheap annual credit pack does not answer it at all, so if competitor depth is your actual question, the cheapest tool is the wrong tool rather than a slower one.

The cost nobody in this band prints

Keywords Everywhere's page uses a bare dollar sign and names no currency code. LowFruits states "All pricing is in USD" and prints no local option. None of the six served a Singapore dollar figure. So every price above arrives on your card as a foreign currency transaction plus whatever your issuer charges to convert it, and the 9 per cent GST reaches you through one of two different routes depending on whether your company is GST registered. That is a rule about you rather than about the vendor, and our page on what SEO tools really cost a Singapore buyer sets out both regimes with the IRAS wording and the four questions that turn a list price into a budget line. On an USD 84 purchase the conversion charge is trivial. On a yearly subscription at the top of this table it is a line worth knowing.

Questions about cheap keyword research tools

What is the cheapest keyword research tool that is actually useful?

On the figures we could read on 28 October 2026, Keywords Everywhere at USD 7 a month billed annually, which its page states as USD 84 a year for 100,000 credits, with one credit returning volume, cost per click, competition and a twelve month trend for one keyword. It is cheap because it is narrow: it answers lookups and it does not crawl your site or track your rankings.

Why could you not publish a price for three of these tools?

Because the price was not in the page. Mangools, LowFruits and Ubersuggest all served working pages that describe their plan structures while rendering the figures in the browser, so the document itself carries no number. That is a fact about those pages rather than about those products, and the figures are presumably visible to a person with a browser. It is recorded as unread on that date rather than reported as absent, and a buyer should open the pages and read them.

Is a free keyword tool enough for a small Singapore business?

For the first few months, usually yes. Keyword Planner gives you Google's own grouped estimate for Singapore, and Search Console gives you the queries your pages already appear for. The point at which paying becomes worthwhile is when you need to see which keywords a named competitor ranks for, because that is the one thing every free tier withholds.

Do credits expire?

On the two credit based tools that published their terms, yes. Keywords Everywhere states credits are valid for one year from the date of purchase. LowFruits states that pay as you go credits have a lifetime of one year and that monthly plan credits do not roll over from one month to the next, which is a sharper rule and worth knowing before you buy a monthly plan you will use in bursts.

Is a cheap tool's Singapore volume figure accurate?

It is as accurate as the source it inherited, and almost all of them inherit the same advertising planner estimate. The two errors to guard against are reading a global figure as a Singapore one, which the default location setting makes easy, and adding up phrasings that belong to one normalised group. Neither error is the tool's fault and both are expensive.

Should I buy a cheap tool or one concentrated month of an expensive one?

If the job is a one off research project, one month of a capable plan and then cancel. If the job is ongoing lookups at low volume, an annual credit pack is better value and there is nothing to remember to cancel. The two purchases solve different problems, and the mistake is buying the subscription for the first job and keeping it for eleven months you did not use.

The lookup none of these tools has a credit for

Every tool on this page is priced in units of the same action: ask a search index how many people typed a phrase. That action has a price because the answer is a stored number. The question a Singapore buyer now also needs answered has no stored number anywhere: when somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews who to use for what you sell, which businesses get named. There is no volume figure for it, no result page to scrape, and no credit pack in the keyword market that covers it, because it is a different kind of question. Taking a dated reading of what those five say about your category, with the sources each answer leaned on shown, is what aiknowsus.com does and the only thing it does, and the first one needs no card.