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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 90761, member: 27"] Ahrefs' cheapest full plan now costs $129 a month, but a $29 Starter tier has sat below it since September 2024. That matters if you are working from an older comparison. Plenty of them still quote $99 for the entry plan and mention a seven-day trial for $7. Neither one appears on Ahrefs' current pricing page. At $129, Ahrefs stops being an obvious buy for a one-person site, which is why [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/keysearch-vs-ahrefs-who-does-keywords-better.16216/']the case for cheaper keyword tools[/URL][/B] gets made so often by bloggers watching their costs. The $29 tier changes that math, and on paper it hands you most of the toolkit, since Starter opens Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, and Rank Tracker. The restrictions live underneath those names, in how much each one lets you pull. [HEADING=2]Credits drain faster than the price suggests[/HEADING] Starter gives you 200 credits a month. Lite gives 1,000 for $129, and both sit in the credit-based bracket, while Standard and above run with no monthly usage ceiling at all. Ahrefs pitched the cheap tier at people who had outgrown its free plan but were not ready for a real subscription. [B]The way Ahrefs counts credits[/B] is where small budgets go wrong. Opening a report in Site Explorer or Keywords Explorer costs one credit for the entire report, which sounds generous. Then you apply a filter and click show results. Another credit. Change the date range, another. Open the SERP viewer, check position history, switch grouping to one link per domain, add a competitor to a chart, and each of those clicks bills you again. A single afternoon spent on one rival can run through twenty or thirty credits. At 200 a month, that is six or seven proper research sessions before you are locked out until the reset. Two rules soften it. Reopening the same report within thirty minutes is free, so switching between tabs costs nothing, and sorting or paging through results you already loaded is free as well. Your dashboard takes a credit every 31 days, plus one more each time you add a project. Bulk work is the bargain here. Up to 10,000 keywords through Keywords Explorer costs one credit. Two hundred URLs through Batch Analysis costs one. Site Audit and Rank Tracker never touch your credit balance at all, because they run on separate limits of their own. [HEADING=2]The row limit bites before the credits do[/HEADING] Starter caps every report at 250 rows. Lite allows 2,500. That gap does more damage than the credit count, and most pricing roundups leave it out entirely. Pull the organic keywords for a rival that ranks for tens of thousands of terms, and you see 250 of them. You can filter down to something useful, but every filter costs a credit, so you end up paying to work around the cap. Everything else scales down to match. Fifty tracked keywords instead of 750. One month of historical data instead of six, which means you cannot look back at what a page was doing last spring. The smaller ceilings pile up quietly. Site Audit crawls 500 pages on an unverified project where Lite crawls 25,000, the SEO Toolbar covers around 800 search results a month rather than 40,000, and you get five keyword lists holding 100 keywords each. One unverified project, too, against Lite's five. You also cannot buy your way out. Extra credits, extra seats, and add-ons are all blocked on Starter, and billing is monthly only, so the annual discount that trims the bigger plans by roughly 17 percent never applies to you. Ahrefs blocks downgrades into Starter as well. Upgrade to Lite for one busy month, and the $29 option closes behind you. Worth knowing before you click. [HEADING=2]Ahrefs Free costs nothing and never expires[/HEADING] Below Starter sits a free plan with no card required and no expiry date, covering six tools that include Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics. The catch is verification. Those three only work on sites you have proved you own, so the free tier tells you plenty about your own pages and nothing about anybody else's. Inside that boundary, it is generous. Site Explorer shows 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords at a time; Site Audit gets 5,000 crawl credits a month for each project, and the SEO Toolbar runs without any verification at all. The AI writing helper allows one document a month. That boundary is what your $29 actually buys. Competitor data. Starter opens Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer on domains you do not own, and that one permission is the whole difference between paying nothing and paying something. [/QUOTE]

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