Free ASO tools: what you can actually get without paying

Most "free ASO tools" lists are lead magnets for paid products. This one is written by a paid product, so here is the limit up front: the free things below are real and useful, and none of them will give you rank history, because history has to be captured daily before you ask for it. That is the one thing you cannot get retroactively, at any price.

Free, from Apple, with no account

Apple publishes more than people realise. These are the sources Atlaso itself is built on, and you can query them yourself:

• Chart feeds. Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing, per country and per category, up to 100 apps each. Today only: Apple keeps no archive.
• App metadata. The lookup endpoint returns rating, rating count, price, version, seller and last update for any app id.
• Search results. What actually ranks for a term in a given storefront.
• Reviews. The customer-reviews feed, most recent first, roughly ten pages deep. This is the most under-used free source in ASO by a distance.
• Search autocomplete. The suggestion endpoint the store's own search box uses, which is as close to free keyword volume as Apple offers.

Be polite with all of them: they are undocumented, unauthenticated and rate-limited, and hammering them gets your IP throttled rather than banned outright.

Free, for your own app

App Store Connect gives you impressions, product page views, conversion rate and downloads for apps you own. No third-party tool can see that, and it is the only place the funnel is measured rather than modelled. Free and often ignored.

Free, from us, with no account

• Keyword difficulty checker. One term, one storefront, a difficulty and a popularity proxy computed from live search results. No sign-up, no card.
• Most searched keywords. Every term we have scored, filtered by storefront, App Store category and how much demand it carries. The category comes off the apps Apple returns for the term, not a hand-written tag.
• One complete Scout run, all 25 categories across the US, UK and Turkey: scored opportunities, the review complaints behind each one, and the market structure of every category.
• The run archive, where older monthly runs are released in full as they age out.
• Daily chart pages per storefront and a page per charted app, with the movement we have captured so far.
• The scoring method, in full, so you can reproduce the judgement rather than trust it.

What free cannot do

• History. Every free source is a snapshot of today. Movement, trend and "is this niche accelerating" all need someone to have been recording daily.
• Scale. One keyword by hand is easy. Two hundred keywords across seven storefronts, every day, is a rate-limited job with retries and backoff.
• Joins. A chart position means little until it sits next to the app's rating trend, its recent complaints and how much it costs to enter that category.

Trials are not free tiers

Most paid suites offer a time-boxed trial rather than a permanent free plan. AppTweak and App Radar both published a 7-day trial and no free plan when this page was checked; Appfigures is the real exception, with a free tier that covers ranks, ratings and your own app's numbers. Ours is a trial too: 7 days, card required, from $29 a month.

The difference is what stays free afterwards, and for us that is a complete published run, the checker and every chart page. A side-by-side of all of them is on the tools comparison page.

If you want to see the paid output before spending anything, read the free run first. If you are weighing us against a full suite, the AppTweak comparison is the honest version, limits included.