Ahrefs Pricing: All Plans, Hidden Costs and What You Actually Pay

Ahrefs’ pricing starts at $29 per month for the Starter plan and runs to $1,499 per month for Enterprise. The four core plans are Lite at $129 per month, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449 and Enterprise at $1,499. Annual billing takes two months off the yearly bill, which is a saving of 16.67 percent. There’s no free trial on any paid plan, but Ahrefs Free (the account Ahrefs used to call Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) gives verified site owners permanent access to six tools at no cost.

Prices verified on ahrefs.com/pricing on 6 September 2026.

Ahrefs Pricing at a Glance (September 2026)

Five paid tiers plus a free account cover everyone from a single-site owner to a Fortune 500 marketing department. The table gives you the monthly rate, what a full year costs if you prepay, and the keyword tracking allowance that usually decides which tier you land on.

Plan	Monthly (USD)	Annual per month (USD)	Annual total (USD)	Tracked keywords	Best for
Ahrefs Free	$0	n/a	n/a	n/a	Owners checking their own verified site
Starter	$29	Monthly only	n/a	n/a	Beginners doing light research
Lite	$129	$107.50	$1,290	750	Freelancers and solo SEOs
Standard	$249	$207.50	$2,490	2,000	Small agencies and in-house teams
Advanced	$449	$374.17	$4,490	5,000	Mid-size agencies
Enterprise	$1,499	Annual commitment	Not published	From 10,000	Large organisations needing SSO

Enterprise is the only tier that’s locked to an annual commitment. Everything else you can buy month to month and cancel from account settings whenever you like.

Is There a Free Ahrefs Plan?

Ahrefs does have a free plan, and it’s called Ahrefs Free. It replaced the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools name in 2026, and the account itself’s the same one: free forever, no credit card, no expiry date. Every competitor comparison you’ll read still uses the old name.

Six tools are included, and they don’t expire. Three of them need you to prove you own the website first, and three work on any account.

• Site Explorer (verified sites): keywords you rank for, top traffic pages and who links to you, capped at 1,000 backlinks and keywords visible at once
• Site Audit (verified sites): 170+ technical and on-page checks, 5,000 crawl credits per month per project
• Web Analytics (verified sites): a privacy-first Google Analytics alternative, up to 1 million events per project
• Social Media Manager: unlimited channels and posts while it stays in beta
• AI Content Helper: one free document per month
• SEO Toolbar: Domain Rating, URL Rating and keyword ideas on any page you visit

What Ahrefs Free won’t do is competitive research. Site Explorer only works on domains you’ve verified, so you can’t point it at a rival. Keywords Explorer and Rank Tracker aren’t part of the free account at all. If you cancel a paid plan, your account drops back to Ahrefs Free rather than disappearing. We have mapped what you give up in free Ahrefs alternatives if you’re weighing the free route seriously.

Ahrefs Starter Plan ($29/Month)

Starter costs $29 per month and is the cheapest way to get Ahrefs data about sites you don’t own. It runs on credits: 200 a month, spent when you open reports or pull fresh data.

The plan gives you the SEO Dashboard, Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, Web Analytics, Social Media Manager and the SEO Toolbar. Site Audit and Rank Tracker don’t eat credits because they carry their own limits.

The Starter plan restrictions people miss

Three contract terms catch buyers out, and they’re easy to miss. You can’t buy extra users, extra credits or any add-on on Starter. You can’t downgrade into Starter from Lite or higher, so it’s a first purchase only. And it renews monthly only, with no annual option.

Who should choose the Starter plan

Starter suits one person, one website and a few hours of SEO work a month. It’s not an agency plan and it’s not a team plan. If you expect to check more than a handful of competitor domains each week, 200 credits will run out and Lite’s the honest answer.

Ahrefs Lite Plan ($129/Month)

Lite costs $129 per month, or $1,290 for a full year if you prepay, which works out at $107.50 a month. It’s the entry point most freelancers and solo in-house marketers pick.

What the Lite plan includes

• 5 projects without ownership verification, unlimited if you verify them
• 750 tracked keywords, updated weekly
• 100,000 Site Audit crawl credits per month, up to 25,000 pages per project
• 6 months of historical data
• 2,500 rows per report and 500,000 export rows per month
• 1 user seat with 1,000 credits, plus up to 2 more seats at $40 per month each
• 5 tracked AI prompts with 150 Brand Radar checks per month
• API and MCP access, capped at 100 rows per request

One correction worth making, because most comparison pages get this wrong: Content Explorer isn’t on Lite. Neither are Portfolios or Batch Analysis. Those start at Standard. Direct API access, on the other hand, is now on every paid plan, including this one.

Is the Lite plan right for you?

Lite works if you’re managing one to five sites and pulling data in bursts rather than continuously. The limit that bites first isn’t the price, it’s the 2,500 rows per report. A backlink profile of any size gets truncated, and exporting a full keyword set for a large competitor just isn’t possible on this tier.

Anyone running 10 or more client sites, or needing data older than six months, will outgrow Lite inside a quarter. Standard is the next honest step.

Ahrefs Standard Plan ($249/Month)

Standard costs $249 per month, or $2,490 a year at $207.50 per month on annual billing. It’s the tier most working agencies settle on.

What the Standard plan includes

• 20 unverified projects and 100 Portfolio target URLs
• 2,000 tracked keywords
• 500,000 crawl credits per month, up to 50,000 pages per project
• 2 years of historical data
• 30,000 rows per report and 1.5 million export rows per month
• Unlimited credits per user, plus up to 5 extra seats at $60 per month each
• 10 tracked AI prompts with 300 Brand Radar checks per month
• 400,000 Ahrefs Connect integration units per month, 250 rows per API request
• Content Explorer, Batch Analysis, SERP comparison, keyword clusters and search intents

Standard costs $120 a month more than Lite, or $1,200 more across a prepaid year. The step from 2,500 to 30,000 rows per report is why this tier exists. Twelve times the data per pull changes what competitive analysis you can actually finish in an afternoon.

Is the Standard plan right for you?

Standard fits in-house teams that watch a primary domain plus competitors, and agencies carrying five to fifteen clients. The two-year history window covers seasonal work and the aftermath of a core update.

Where it runs out: more than 20 concurrent projects, or repeated audits of sites in the hundreds of thousands of pages. At that point the crawl credit ceiling arrives before the row ceiling does.

Ahrefs Advanced Plan ($449/Month)

Advanced costs $449 per month, or $4,490 a year at $374.17 per month. It’s built for agencies and in-house teams whose reporting has outgrown exports.

What the Advanced plan includes

• 50 unverified projects and 250 Portfolio target URLs
• 5,000 tracked keywords
• 1,500,000 crawl credits per month, up to 250,000 pages per project
• 5 years of historical data
• 75,000 rows per report and 4 million export rows per month
• 1 user seat, plus up to 10 extra at $80 per month each
• 20 tracked AI prompts with 600 Brand Radar checks per month
• 1 million Ahrefs Connect integration units per month, 500 rows per API request
• 15 Report Builder reports with 150 widgets, plus Looker Studio integration

Is the Advanced plan right for you?

Advanced earns its price when two things are true at once: you need five years of history for trend work, and you’re pushing Ahrefs data into Looker Studio or a warehouse. The Looker Studio connector and the jump to 1 million integration units are the real upgrade here, not the extra projects.

If your portfolio sits under 20 projects, Standard covers the same ground for $200 a month less.

Ahrefs Enterprise Plan ($1,499/Month)

Enterprise is listed at $1,499 per month with an annual commitment required. Ahrefs doesn’t publish a discounted annual rate for it, so treat $17,988 as the yearly floor and expect the real number to come out of a sales conversation.

What the Enterprise plan includes

• 100 unverified projects, 100 competitors per project and 1,000 Portfolio target URLs
• From 10,000 tracked keywords
• From 5 million crawl credits per month, up to 5 million pages per project
• Unlimited historical data
• 150,000 rows per report and from 10 million export rows per month
• From 3 included users, unlimited additional seats at $100 per month each
• From 83 tracked AI prompts with from 2,500 Brand Radar checks per month
• Uncapped API access with unlimited rows per request
• SSO, access management, audit logs, forecasting and trends

Is the Enterprise plan right for you?

Enterprise makes sense on two grounds: headcount and governance, and if neither applies you’re overpaying. SSO, an audit log and access management are the features large organisations can’t buy at any lower tier, and unlimited seats stop the per-user maths from spiralling.

Do the arithmetic before you commit, because the gap isn’t as wide as it looks. Advanced at $449 with eight extra seats at $80 comes to $1,089 a month, which is still under Enterprise. The tipping point is closer to 14 seats, or the first time compliance asks about single sign-on.

Annual vs. Monthly Billing: What You Actually Save

Annual billing on Ahrefs means you’re paying for ten months and getting twelve. Ahrefs markets it as saving up to 17 percent, and the exact figure is 16.67 percent.

Plan	12 months billed monthly (USD)	Annual total (USD)	Saving per year (USD)
Lite	$1,548	$1,290	$258
Standard	$2,988	$2,490	$498
Advanced	$5,388	$4,490	$898
Enterprise	Annual commitment required	Not published	n/a

There’s a catch in the mechanics. You can’t switch an existing subscription to annual billing yourself. Ahrefs asks you to email support to make the change, so do it at signup if you already know you’re staying.

Annual also changes how overages work, so it isn’t only a discount. On an annual plan you can prepay extra credits and data at a discounted rate instead of being billed for them month by month.

Ahrefs Add-ons and What They Cost

The base plan is a floor, not a ceiling. Four optional add-ons sit on top of it, and the seat charge is the one nearly every team pays.

Extra user seats

Every paid plan ships with one seat, and that’s rarely enough. Extra seats are priced by tier and capped by tier.

• Lite: $40 per user per month, up to 2 extra
• Standard: $60 per user per month, up to 5 extra
• Advanced: $80 per user per month, up to 10 extra
• Enterprise: $100 per user per month, unlimited

A three-person team on Standard pays $249 plus $120, so that’s $369 a month. If you’ve not prepaid for the seats, Ahrefs charges them automatically on a pay-as-you-go basis. Budget for seats from day one, because sharing one login across a team is exactly what this pricing exists to stop.

Content Kit (from $99/month)

Content Kit bundles AI Content Helper and AI Content Grader, with AI Content Inventory listed as coming soon. Ahrefs prices it from $99 per month rather than at a flat rate, so the figure you see depends on the volume you select.

Report Builder ($99/month)

Report Builder is already included in every plan at a small size: 5 reports and 30 widgets on Lite and Standard, 15 reports and 150 widgets on Advanced, 25 reports and 250 widgets on Enterprise. The $99 add-on raises that to 50 reports, 500 total widgets and scheduled delivery. Agencies sending client reports on a fixed cadence are the intended buyer.

Project Boost Pro ($20/project) and Max ($200/project)

Project Boost is priced per project, not per account, and that’s the detail that makes it expensive at scale. Pro at $20 adds IndexNow auto-submission, instant recrawl, Ask AI in Site Audit, always-on auditing at 10 pages a minute and AI detection on 1,000 URLs per crawl. Max at $200 raises always-on auditing to 30 pages a minute, removes the AI detection cap and adds Patches and batch AI.

What Ahrefs AI Prompt Tracking Costs

Every paid Ahrefs plan now includes tracked AI prompts, from 5 on Lite to 20 on Advanced, and tracking beyond that allowance is sold separately in packages starting at $50 per month. This is the newest line on the bill and it’s the one most pricing comparisons haven’t caught up with.

The mechanics aren’t complicated. Tracking one prompt, on one AI platform, in one location, uses one check. Prompts refresh daily, so 5 tracked prompts on Lite consume roughly 150 checks a month, which is exactly the allowance Lite carries.

Package	Price per month (USD)	Included checks	Overage per check (USD)
Basic	$50	2,500	$0.020
Growth	$100	7,000	$0.015
Scale	$250	25,000	$0.010

Overage lands at the end of the billing month, and the per-check rate falls as the package grows. Basic is roughly 80 prompts daily on one platform, Growth is about 100 prompts across two platforms.

Brand Radar is also sold on its own from $199 per month if AI visibility is all you want. Buying it standalone comes with an Ahrefs Free account attached, which means you get the six free tools without paying for a Lite plan you wouldn’t use.

Ahrefs Hidden Costs You Should Know About

Four things push an Ahrefs bill past the sticker price, and none of them are hidden in the sense of being secret. They are just easy to miss when you’re comparing headline numbers.

Pay-as-you-go credits and data

Once you switch on additional pay-as-you-go credits and data, Ahrefs charges you automatically whenever consumption passes your plan limits. Ahrefs doesn’t publish a per-credit rate for crawl credits or export rows, so the only way to control this is to watch the usage dashboard. If you haven’t looked at it this month, look.

Pay-as-you-go purchases expire. Report credits, export rows, crawl credits and API units last three billing months including the one you bought them in. Prepaid limits are always spent first, so buying credits early in a quiet month is a way to lose them.

The row ceilings, not the price, decide your tier

Max rows per report runs 2,500 on Lite, 30,000 on Standard, 75,000 on Advanced and 150,000 on Enterprise. Monthly export rows run 500,000, 1.5 million, 4 million and from 10 million. Teams usually discover they’re on the wrong plan through a truncated export, not through a price review.

What API access costs on each plan

Ahrefs API access costs nothing extra, because it now ships with every paid plan including Lite. What differs is throughput: a single request returns at most 100 rows on Lite, 250 on Standard, 500 on Advanced and an uncapped number on Enterprise.

Ahrefs Connect, the integration path most teams actually use, carries its own monthly allowance of 100,000 units on Lite, 400,000 on Standard, 1 million on Advanced and 2 million on Enterprise. The MCP server sits under the same row limits as the REST API.

This is the fact most Ahrefs pricing comparisons still get wrong. Pages written before the summer sell standalone API subscriptions at $500, $2,000 and $10,000 a month, and Ahrefs no longer publishes those tiers anywhere on its site.

Budget for the list price, because it never moves

Whatever number you see today is the number you’ll pay, so there’s no waiting for a sale to make the maths work. Black Friday changes nothing here, promo codes don’t exist, and volume negotiation only starts at Enterprise. Annual billing is the single lever, and it moves the price by 16.67 percent.

Refunds are narrow

Ahrefs doesn’t issue refunds as a rule. Monthly subscribers can ask for one if they haven’t used the service, and Ahrefs may still decline if it sees material activity on the account. Annual prepayments aren’t refundable, so the twelve-month commitment’s real money at risk. There are no contracts and no setup fees on any tier, and you can switch or cancel at any time from account settings. Upgrades apply immediately, downgrades and cancellations at the end of the current period.

Which Currency Does Ahrefs Bill In?

Ahrefs lists its plans in US dollars, but the currency you’re quoted depends on where you connect from. Opened from a European connection, ahrefs.com/pricing shows Lite at €119 per month and €1,190 per year rather than $129 and $1,290. The structure is identical in both currencies, because the annual price is always ten months of the monthly price.

Accepted cards are Visa, Mastercard, American Express and UnionPay. Enterprise customers can also pay by wire transfer on request. If your card is issued outside the currency you’re billed in, expect your bank to add a conversion fee on top.

Ahrefs vs. Semrush: Pricing Comparison

Semrush restructured its plans in 2026 and the old Pro, Guru and Business names are gone, so any comparison that still quotes Guru at $249.95 isn’t current. Here’s how the current line-ups sit next to each other.

Plan	Monthly (USD)	Annual per month (USD)	Sites	Tracked keywords
Ahrefs Lite	$129	$107.50	5 projects	750 weekly
Semrush SEO	$139	$117.33	5 websites	500 daily
Ahrefs Standard	$249	$207.50	20 projects	2,000 weekly
Semrush Starter	$199	$165.17	5 websites	500 daily
Ahrefs Advanced	$449	$374.17	50 projects	5,000 weekly
Semrush Pro+	$299	$248.17	15 websites	1,500 daily

The two platforms aren’t priced like for like any more. Semrush now sells SEO and AI visibility as one bundle and its top tier, Advanced, runs $549 per month with 40 websites and API access. Ahrefs gives you far more tracked keywords and projects per dollar, Semrush updates rankings daily where Ahrefs updates weekly.

On AI visibility the gap runs the other way. Semrush Starter tracks 50 prompts daily at $199, while Ahrefs Standard includes 10 tracked prompts at $249 and charges from $50 a month for more. If AI prompt tracking is the reason you’re buying, price that line separately before you decide.

When Not to Pay for Ahrefs

Three situations make a paid Ahrefs plan the wrong purchase.

You’re running one website and spending under ten hours a month on SEO. Google Search Console plus Ahrefs Free covers rank data, search traffic and backlink monitoring for a site you own, at no cost. Adding a $10 to $40 keyword tool alongside it gets you research capability for a fraction of Lite.

Keyword research is all you really need. Ahrefs is differentiated on backlink data quality and historical depth, which isn’t what you’re paying for if you only ever open Keywords Explorer. Several of the best free keyword research tools handle volume and difficulty perfectly well.

You’re a team of five weighing cost per seat. Five people on Standard costs $249 plus four seats at $60, so $489 a month, and the same team on Advanced costs $769. Platforms with flat team pricing get cheaper than Ahrefs somewhere around the fourth seat.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Ahrefs offer a free trial?

Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial on any paid plan, and it says so directly on its pricing page. The free alternative is Ahrefs Free, which doesn’t expire, and the cheapest paid way to see the full toolset is the $29 Starter plan.

What is the cheapest Ahrefs plan?

The cheapest paid Ahrefs plan is Starter at $29 per month, and the cheapest option overall is the free Ahrefs Free account. Starter is the first tier that lets you research sites you don’t own.

Does Ahrefs run discounts or promo codes?

Ahrefs doesn’t run discounts, and it says so on its own pricing FAQ. Annual billing at ten months for twelve is the only price reduction available.

Can I cancel my Ahrefs subscription?

You can cancel at any time from your account settings, with no contract and no cancellation fee. Access continues to the end of the period you’ve paid for, and the account then reverts to Ahrefs Free.

Can I switch between Ahrefs plans?

Switching plans happens in account settings and works in both directions, with one exception. Upgrades take effect immediately, downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing period, and no plan can be downgraded to Starter.

Does Ahrefs charge in USD?

Ahrefs prices its plans in US dollars, but visitors in some regions get quoted and charged in local currency instead. A European visitor sees Lite at €119 per month rather than $129, so check which currency your own pricing page shows before you budget. It isn’t always dollars.

Is Ahrefs worth the cost?

Ahrefs is worth it for anyone running regular keyword research, backlink analysis and site audits across several sites, where Lite or Standard usually pays for itself in hours saved. It’s poor value for occasional work on a single site, where Search Console and Ahrefs Free cover most of the same ground for nothing. Our Ahrefs review after 12 months of daily use goes through where the data actually earns the money.