In short
- Ahrefs pricing runs from $29 a month for Starter to $129, $249 and $449 for Lite, Standard and Advanced, each with one user, and Enterprise from $1,499 a month on a yearly commitment.
- For an agency, Standard is the usual starting point: unlimited credits, 2,000 tracked keywords and room for five more users at $60 each.
- Three people running 10 client sites pay $468 a month on Standard, with the Report Builder add-on for a monthly report per client; yearly billing takes two months off the plan.
- The catch: there is no free trial or discount, rankings update weekly, and the bill follows the size of your team, not your client list.
Ahrefs plans and prices
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiteOne person or a small team on a few sites | $129 | $1,290 a year |
|
| StandardA small team researching every day | $249 | $2,490 a year |
|
| AdvancedLarger teams and agencies | $449 | $4,490 a year |
|
| EnterpriseLarge organisations with API and security needs | From $1,499 | Custom, yearly commitment required |
|
| StarterOccasional keyword and competitor lookups | $29 | n/a |
|
| Ahrefs FreeSite owners checking their own sites | $0 | $0 |
|
Prices in USD, from Ahrefs’ pricing page on 6 October 2026. Every paid plan includes one user; yearly billing gives two months free on every plan except Starter, which renews monthly only, and Enterprise is sold on a yearly commitment. Source, checked 6 Oct 2026.
Add-ons and extra costs
| Extra | Price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Extra users | $40, $60 or $80 a month each; $100 on Enterprise | Lite takes up to 2 more, Standard 5 and Advanced 10; Starter takes none. Users added without prepaying are billed automatically. |
| Report Builder | $99 a month | 50 reports and 500 widgets. The plans include 1 report on Free and Starter, 5 on Lite and Standard, 15 on Advanced and 25 on Enterprise. |
| AI Content Helper | $99 a month | 50 documents a month for AI-assisted writing; Ahrefs Free gets 1. |
| Content Kit | $299 a month | 250 AI Content Helper documents a month plus AI Content Grader, with Content Inventory listed as coming. |
| Brand Radar AI | From $199 a month; $699 for all AI platforms | How often a brand comes up across 447 million+ prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Copilot. Also sold on its own. |
| Custom prompt packages | $50, $100 or $250 a month | 2,500, 7,000 or 25,000 more AI prompt checks a month beyond the plan’s 5 to 20 prompts; overage costs 1 to 2 cents a check. |
| Project Boost Pro | $20 a month per project | An always-on site audit at 10 pages a minute, instant recrawls and Ask AI in Site Audit. |
| Project Boost Max | $200 a month per project | An always-on site audit at 30 pages a minute, Patches and Batch AI in Site Audit. |
| Extra credits | $50 per 500 credits | Pay as you go on Lite, once switched on; Standard and up have unlimited credits, and Starter can’t buy more. |
What an agency pays
3 client sites, a team of two
Ahrefs: $169 a month
Lite at $129 plus one extra user at $40. Each client site you verify is a free project, 750 tracked keywords leave 250 per site, and Lite’s 5 reports cover a monthly one for each client. Yearly billing brings the plan itself to $1,290 a year.
10 client sites, a team of three
Ahrefs: $468 a month
Standard at $249, two extra users at $60 each ($120) and Report Builder at $99, because Standard includes 5 reports and each client gets one a month. 2,000 tracked keywords make 200 per site, and credits are unlimited.
25 client sites, a team of five
Ahrefs: $868 a month
Advanced at $449, four extra users at $80 each ($320) and Report Builder at $99, because Advanced includes 15 reports. 5,000 tracked keywords make 200 per site. The plan’s 20 tracked AI prompts come to less than one per client; a prompt package adds more from $50 a month.
Is Ahrefs worth it?
Ahrefs is worth it when research across the web is the work you sell: its link and keyword data are among the deepest there is, and you pay for each person who uses them.
Worth it if
- Links are your service. Link building and digital PR run on its backlink index, refreshed every 15 to 30 minutes.
- A small team covers many sites. Verified client sites are free, unlimited projects, so seats set the bill.
- You build your own tools. API and MCP access come with every plan from Lite.
Look elsewhere if
- Your team keeps growing. Each colleague adds $40 to $80 a month, and Lite stops at three users.
- Clients want daily rankings. Rank Tracker updates weekly on every plan.
- You want to try it first. There is no free trial, and Ahrefs Free covers only sites you verify.
Where Orbit fits
Ahrefs sells research across the web, priced by the seat. The monthly work on each client site, finding what to change, doing it and showing the client what it earned, stays with your team. Orbit is priced per client site and built for that job, so the two sit side by side: Ahrefs for link research, Orbit for each client’s own site.
Priced per client site
A new colleague adds no cost, and clients invited as guests are never billed.
Every client in one view
Searches, visitors, leads, links, site health and AI answers for each client site, in one hub.
The monthly report, written
Ask for a client’s report and get one page from its own numbers, for your team to check and send.
The work, measured
On Zenith, Orbit drafts the work, publishes it once someone approves and measures what each task earned.
Ahrefs free trial and free plan
Ahrefs runs no free trial and says it never runs discounts: no Black Friday or other seasonal sales, no special pricing for nonprofits, and no promo codes, which it calls not legitimate when found on other sites. What it offers instead is Ahrefs Free: Site Explorer and Site Audit for sites you verify as your own, Web Analytics, one AI Content Helper document and one Report Builder report a month.
Refunds are the exception. Ahrefs does not issue refunds in general; on a monthly plan you can ask for one if you haven’t used the service, and it may decline if the account shows real activity. There are no contracts or setup fees, and you can cancel any time: the plan runs to the end of the period, then drops to Ahrefs Free.
Ahrefs monthly vs yearly pricing
Paying yearly gives two months free: you pay for ten months and get twelve, which Ahrefs’ pricing page rounds to “save up to 17%”. Starter renews monthly only, and Enterprise needs a yearly commitment. To move a running plan to yearly billing, Ahrefs asks you to contact support.
| Plan | Monthly | Yearly | Saved a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | $129 a month | $1,290 a year | $258 |
| Standard | $249 a month | $2,490 a year | $498 |
| Advanced | $449 a month | $4,490 a year | $898 |
Ahrefs credits, projects and usage limits
Credits only matter on the two smallest plans. Starter includes 200 credits a month and Lite 1,000 per user; Standard and up have unlimited credits. A credit is spent each time you open a report, apply a filter or load more data, while Site Audit and Rank Tracker don’t use them. On Lite, more credits cost $50 per 500, pay as you go, which stays off until you switch it on.
Projects work in an agency’s favour. A site you verify, through Google Search Console, a file, a DNS record or a meta tag, is a free project with no limit on any plan, and adds 500 Site Explorer credits and 5,000 crawl credits a month. The 5, 20, 50 or 100 projects in each plan are for sites you can’t verify, such as a prospect’s.
Two charges can arrive without a new order: users added without prepaying are billed automatically, and once pay-as-you-go is on, so is extra data (export rows, crawl credits and API units) beyond the plan’s limits. What you buy that way lasts three billing months.
How Ahrefs pricing changed in 2026
This year the limits moved more than the prices. From Ahrefs’ changelog:
- 4 April 2026: monthly credits went up, on Starter from 100 to 200 and on Lite from 500 to 1,000.
- 28 April 2026: API limits rose sharply on Lite, Standard and Advanced.
- 21 May 2026: projects take up to 20 competitors instead of 10, and up to 100 on the current Enterprise plan.
Ahrefs pricing against Semrush and Moz
Seat for seat, Ahrefs sits just under Semrush, which starts at $139.95 a month for one user with extra users at $45 to $100. Moz Pro costs $49 to $299 a month. Semrush vs Ahrefs and Ahrefs vs Moz compare what you get for the money, and our Ahrefs alternatives rank nine other options for agencies.
For the monthly work on each client site, Orbit vs Ahrefs sets a research database priced per seat against a platform priced per client site. Orbit reads each site’s own searches, links and AI answers, and writes the monthly client report from them.
How we checked
Every fact about Ahrefs comes from the vendor’s own website, read on 6 Oct 2026: its pricing page where it publishes one, otherwise its help pages and announcements. Each price links to the page it came from, in US dollars as the vendor states them.
Orbit is our own product, and the page says so wherever it appears. Its prices come from our pricing page. Prices change; if you spot one that has, tell us and we correct the page.
Written by
Leon Missoul, Founder
I started the web agency Luniq in 2025 and built Orbit from the software we used to keep our clients’ sites growing after launch. I write about search, AI answers and how to prove what website work earns.