I Cloned a $99/Month AI Marketing Tool in One Evening — Here's What I Learned

Tom Ford — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:52:53 GMT

Last night I came across a startup called Okara that just launched an "AI CMO" — a tool that deploys AI agents across Reddit, Twitter, SEO, and content to automate your marketing. Price tag: $99/month.

Being a developer, my first thought was: how hard would this actually be to build?

Four hours later, I had my own version running on my domain.

What the tool does

The concept is straightforward. You enter a website URL and it:

Scrapes the page and analyses your copy, meta tags, and structure
Runs a live PageSpeed audit against Google's API
Checks your SEO health (meta title, H1s, alt tags, internal links, OG tags)
Deploys 6 specialist AI agents — SEO, Reddit, Twitter/X, Content, Hacker News, and GEO (AI search optimisation)
Pulls live Reddit threads relevant to your niche
Saves everything to a database with a full run history
Runs automatically every morning via a scheduled cron job

What it actually costs to run

This is where it gets interesting. The real cost breakdown:

Vercel hosting: free
Supabase database: free
Google PageSpeed API: free
Reddit API: free
Anthropic API (the AI): ~£3-5/month for personal use

Total: about £5/month. For something that Okara charges $99/month for.

The uncomfortable truth about AI SaaS

Most AI tools charging $50-100/month are prompt wrappers with good UX. The actual AI is almost never the hard part — it's the packaging, the marketing, and the brand trust.

That's not a criticism of Okara specifically. Building a polished product with support, onboarding, mobile apps, and a brand takes real work and deserves to be paid for. But it's worth understanding what you're actually paying for.

What this means for small businesses

If you're an SME spending money on SEO agencies and social media managers, the tools to do this yourself have never been more accessible. You don't need to be a developer to use AI for marketing — but if you are one, you can build your own infrastructure for almost nothing.

At GetAProSEO, this is exactly what we help businesses understand: how to use modern AI tools to compete without the overhead of traditional agencies.

The takeaway

The gap between "I pay for a SaaS tool" and "I built that tool myself" has collapsed from months of engineering work to a single evening in Cursor. That's a genuinely new thing — and it's changing how smart businesses think about their software spend.