SpyFu
👤 Mike Roberts (Founded GoogSpy in 2005 (renamed SpyFu); 20 years bootstrapped, never a dollar of VC, full control kept.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
Built with $3K and no VC. Twenty years on: 15k+ paying marketers pulling rivals' keyword and ad-spend data.
Will it work? · our read
Patient data moat. It won't out-market Semrush or Ahrefs and doesn't try. A 20-year scrape archive plus a $39 entry price keeps 15k+ marketers paying - and one bootstrapper keeps every dollar.
01How the money moves
Scrape every domain's paid + organic keywords
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Free lookups pull marketers in
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Subscriptions unlock history + exports, from $39/mo
02The numbers
$7M+/yrEstimatefounder-stated, 2019
2019source:
over $7M/yr, about 11k customers
Founder-stated on two podcasts; revenue figure is 2019, customer count 2023.
Founder stated over $7M/yr in 2019; paid customers grew from 11k to 15k+ by 2023.
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 10 September 2026
Growth Everywhere interview (about 2019) - founder states over $7M/yr revenue, about 11k customers, $3K start.Practical Founders #64 (Oct 2023) - over 15,000 paid customers, bootstrapped, no outside capital.Wikipedia: SpyFu - founded April 2005 as GoogSpy; scrapes competitor Google Ads data via technology developed by Velocityscape.SpyFu pricing (2025 listing) - Basic $39, Pro+AI $119, Team $249 per month.Latka (2025 est.) - third-party $2.3M ARR guess; unverified and hard to square with growing customers.
Revenue is first-party: Mike Roberts stated 'over $7 million in revenue annually' on the Growth Everywhere podcast (about 2019), where he also gave about 11,000 customers and a $3K start (all read on that page). No newer revenue figure is public, but on Practical Founders (Oct 2023) he stated 'over 15,000 paid customers' - growth that makes Latka's 2025 $2.3M estimate look too low, so I reject it as an unverified third-party guess. Sourced STATED, not FILED (private company). Pricing ($39/$119/$249 per month) is from a 2025 third-party listing, not the live page (it timed out) and has shifted over time. Note: Practical Founders' episode title marks '18 years' as of Oct 2023 (implying a 2005 founding), but its own text separately says 'SpyFu was launched in 2006'; the card follows Wikipedia's 2005 founding date. The scraping technology itself is credited by Wikipedia to Velocityscape, not to Roberts personally - founder.note has been corrected to not claim he built it himself. verified:true on the founder-stated figures. We never score you.