The free(ish) growth stack I actually use
The most useful growth tooling I touch right now is built by marketers shipping with AI. Here's my list.
Hi everyone ✨ A lot of new subscribers here, so WELCOME - really glad you’re here ☺️ I’m Julie, freelance Senior Growth Consultant for mobile apps and games. I work on ASO, Apple Ads, and CRO, and NeoAds is where I share what’s actually working: tools, tactics, things I find interesting in the industry. My goal is to bring new perspectives, and always try to think outside the box. Let’s get into it.
The most useful tools I’m using now aren’t built by platforms, but by senior practitioners, shipping with AI what used to need a funded company and a roadmap. So here’s my list, from well-known ASO tools to new ones built by other growth marketers that just needed it.
If you’re building something that you think is worth sharing, feel free to reach out and I’d be happy to feature it in a future edition!
The no-brainer: Astro ASO
The best price-to-value ASO tracker on the market, full stop. Unlimited keyword tracking, every geo, and competitor tracking, so you’re watching the whole landscape, not just your own app in a vacuum.
No keyword caps, all in one place and it’s only $108 Billed annually. You can also connect it to Claude Code via MCP and unlock the full experience. I wrote up the exact setup here.
🎯 You might also like:
Visual work: screensdesign + before.click
ScreensDesign is one of my favorite tool. It’s both a flow and screenshot reference library. Recently, they also added a newer AI feature that drafts onboarding flows from scratch. I used the AI screen creator on a recent client onboarding and it’s a genuinely good starting point. Both the library and the generator earn their keep for onboarding/paywall iteration.
Get 50% with the promo code NEOADS50
While ScreensDesign might be locking some content behind a paywall, before.click is the reference layer next to it: a deep archive of onboarding, screenshot, and paywall patterns - all for Free.
The indie AI scene
This is the part worth paying attention to. Senior Growth Practitioners are now shipping real tools, answering to real needs, and they share them all for free.
NeoAds SOV Analyzer
I vibe coded this tool for my clients, to see exactly how visible you are on the Apple Ads keywords that matter. Share of voice by keyword and geo: where you’re dominating, where you’re invisible. 1st or 2nd position, trends by search terms, overview by geo or keywords.
Review Retriever for iOS
Shared by Dash Antonova, Independent Head of Growth. Extract any app’s pain points straight into your LLM: draft CPP or onboarding copy, surface metadata angles, see what users like or don’t from your competitors app, and get clear user-feedback summaries without reading thousands of reviews.
App Store Visibility Checker
Produced by TopPanda, the tool shows where you actually appear on the AppStore: which "you might also like" and Browse placements are driving impressions, and whether a featuring is live.
The pattern under all of this: tools are being built for genuinely specific use cases now.
Where we used to wait months for some big platform to maybe ship the feature we needed, we can now build our own, or grab the one a practitioner already built, in less time than it takes to get a sales call booked.
That’s the real shift: the gap between “I need a thing” and “the thing exists” has basically collapsed.
Julie @ NeoAds - freelance Growth Consultant specialising in Apple Ads, ASO and CRO.