An honest look at the category's free plans
In the Shopify SEO app category, the free plan almost always follows the same business logic: give access to a basic audit — checking title and meta description tags, missing alt text, a few generic recommendations — on a capped number of products or pages, then reserve everything involving automation or content creation at scale for the paid tier. It's a perfectly defensible logic: a one-off audit is cheap to provide for free, while creation at scale and ongoing monitoring demand more resources.
Two features in particular are rarely included in a free plan, whatever the vendor: creating pages in bulk from a keyword list, and an anti-cannibalization check that compares each new page against all already-published content. Both require infrastructure — catalog search, semantic comparison — that few apps justify opening up for free. We compare the category's main players in more detail, feature by feature, in our comparison of the best Shopify SEO apps in 2026.
Before installing an SEO app based on its free plan alone, a few simple questions help compare what's really included: does the free plan give access to page creation, or only to an audit report? Is a credit card required at sign-up, even though the plan is advertised as free? Is an anti-duplicate check mentioned explicitly, or only generic best-practice recommendations? The answers are usually right there on the app's Shopify App Store listing, before you even install it.
What Octopus's Free plan covers
Octopus's Free plan departs from the audit-only logic: it gives access to the page-creation engine itself, with a limit of ten keywords processed over a rolling 30-day window, no credit card required. On this tier, keywords are processed in Product mode — creating SEO collections from your catalog, with the relevance filter and anti-cannibalization included, plus the HTML sitemap and 301 redirects. Editorial mode (the RAG engine, including Aggregation, which requires no AI key at all) becomes available from the Starter tier.
The rolling 30-day window concretely means it's not a monthly quota reset on the 1st of the month, but a counter tracking the last thirty days continuously; an alert warns you at 80% of the quota used, and submitting new keywords is blocked beyond it, with no surprise billing. For a first test, it's better to focus those ten keywords on a single, homogeneous product family rather than spreading them across the whole catalog: it lets you judge the relevance of the matching on a scope where you already know the products well, before extending the method.
Something else that doesn't change by tier is the anti-cannibalization check: it applies to every creation, including on the Free plan, with the two levels of detection already described in our guide on SEO cannibalization — exact and by semantic similarity. It's not a premium feature unlocked by paying: it's part of the engine, whatever the number of keywords processed.
One nuance to know before starting: AI writing (Editorial mode in Hybrid or Generation, AI collection intros) is never included for free, on any tier. It runs on the merchant's own Anthropic key — billed directly by Anthropic, with no markup added by Octopus — whether you're on the Free plan or the highest one. Moving to a paid tier increases the volume of keywords processed per period, not access to the AI itself.
When to move to a paid tier
Ten keywords over a rolling thirty days is enough to test the method on a first representative batch — a product family, a season — and check that the matching and anti-cannibalization behave as expected on your catalog. The limit becomes constraining as soon as the coverage you're aiming for exceeds that monthly volume: a catalog of several hundred SKUs with a long tail to cover, or an agency managing several client stores in parallel.
The most concrete signal that it's time to change tier isn't an abstract number: it's finding yourself, cycle after cycle, having to choose which keywords from your list will wait until next month for lack of available quota. As long as the free plan covers all the keywords you want to process over thirty days, there's no reason to pay more; the day the queue grows faster than it clears, the question answers itself.
Moving to a higher tier changes neither the method nor the checks applied: anti-cannibalization and product matching stay identical across all tiers. What's added as you move up is mainly the volume of keywords processed per period — plus the editorial engine from Starter and a tier designed specifically for the multi-store needs of agencies. The details of volumes and prices per tier are on the Pricing page.
In short
A free Shopify SEO app plan, across the category, most often limits itself to a basic audit. Octopus's Free plan goes further by giving access to the creation engine and to anti-cannibalization from the start, with the only limit being the monthly volume of keywords processed — and never including AI writing, which remains, on every tier, the merchant's responsibility via their own Anthropic key.