Ahrefs Pricing 2026: Plans, Users, Credits and Add-ons

What Ahrefs charges, in one table

Ahrefs publishes all of its self-serve prices on a single page, in US dollars ^[1]. That makes it one of the more transparent SEO tools on the market. The complexity sits elsewhere: in credits, in per-user charges and in a growing list of add-ons. This guide covers every price as of 12 October 2026, read from the United States, and every annual total and comparison below is our own arithmetic. Start with the plan table, then read the sections on users and add-ons before you budget. Those two decide the real bill.

Annual billing: two months free, but only through support

Annual billing charges ten months for twelve, which works out to a 16.7% discount, and the whole year is charged at once. The pricing page rounds this to savings of up to 17%. In practice, Lite drops to the equivalent of US$107.50 a month, Standard to US$207.50 and Advanced to US$374.17. Over a year that saves US$258, US$498 and US$898 respectively. Starter is the exception, since it is sold monthly only, and Enterprise is the reverse case: it comes with an annual commitment and no month-to-month option at all.

The switch is a support ticket

There is no annual toggle at checkout for existing customers. The pricing FAQ tells you to contact support to switch, and the help center says the same thing. That quirk actually suits careful buyers. Start monthly, confirm the tool fits your work, then ask support to move you to annual billing. Because Ahrefs does not issue refunds on annual plans, that order matters more than usual. A month at full price is a cheap way to test.

The plans, one by one

Each paid tier changes three things at once: how many credits you get, how much history you can see and how many projects you can run. The jumps are steep, so it pays to know exactly what each plan unlocks before you pick one. Every plan from Starter to Advanced includes a single user, and the free tier sits underneath them all for verified sites. The real question is whether you need a credit meter at all, which is what separates Lite from Standard.

Starter: US$29 a month for occasional checks

Starter is the cheapest paid plan at US$29 a month, or US$348 over a year, and it is monthly only. It includes 200 credits, 50 tracked keywords, one unverified project, one month of history and no exports. Extra users and extra credits cannot be bought on it. Starter suits someone checking a few competitors and keywords a month. Two hundred credits go fast, because opening a report costs one credit and each filter or date change costs another. Expect a handful of research sessions a month. Not daily work.

Lite: US$129 a month, the first plan with exports

Lite costs US$129 a month or US$1,290 a year ^[1]. It gives 5 projects, 6 months of history, 750 tracked keywords, 5 tracked AI prompts, 100,000 crawl credits and access to the API and MCP. Each user gets 1,000 credits a month. Lite is also the first plan that allows exports, up to 500,000 rows a month. For a solo consultant who needs exports, API access and a modest set of tracked keywords, it is the natural starting point.

Standard: US$249 a month, where the meter stops

Standard costs US$249 a month or US$2,490 a year. Its biggest change is invisible on the feature list: it removes the credit limit per user. It also adds 20 projects, 2 years of history, 2,000 tracked keywords, 500,000 crawl credits and 1.5 million export rows, and it unlocks Content Explorer, Portfolios, Batch Analysis and keyword clusters. For daily research, this is the plan most teams end up on. A researcher who opens fifty reports, filters each one twice and checks a few SERPs every working day would burn through Lite's 1,000 monthly credits in well under three weeks.

Advanced: US$449 a month for agencies

Advanced costs US$449 a month or US$4,490 a year. It gives 50 projects, 5 years of history, 5,000 tracked keywords, 1.5 million crawl credits and 4 million export rows, and it adds the Looker Studio integration plus a listing in Ahrefs' agency directory. Agencies with many client sites and long-term reporting needs are the intended buyers. Five years of history, 50 projects and a directory listing that sends leads matter far more to them than to a single in-house marketer. Most others can skip it.

Enterprise: US$1,499 a month, negotiated

Enterprise costs US$1,499 a month with an annual commitment, or US$17,988 a year. It includes three users, unlimited history, uncapped API access, custom endpoints, SSO and audit logs. It is the only plan with no month-to-month option, and extra users cost US$100 a month each with no cap. Enterprise contracts can replace the standard Terms entirely, and it is the only tier where the base plan is negotiated at all. Ask sales for a written quote.

Credits: what one credit buys

On Starter and Lite, the credit meter decides how far your plan stretches ^[2]. Opening a report costs one credit, and so does each filter you apply, each date change and each SERP check. Some actions are free, though. Reopening the same report with the same settings within 30 minutes costs nothing, and neither does paging through results or sorting them. The dashboard costs one credit every 31 days. Learn these rules early. They separate a month of useful research from a meter that runs dry in the second week.

Bulk lookups stretch the allowance

Two tools give a lot for a single credit. Keywords Explorer can check up to 10,000 keywords at once for one credit, and Batch Analysis can check up to 200 URLs. Batch Analysis starts on Standard, however, so on Lite the bulk keyword lookup is the main way to make 1,000 credits last across a month. If you are on a credit plan, batch your keyword questions instead of opening reports one at a time.

Legacy plans still run on credits

Not every Standard or Advanced customer has unlimited credits. Plans bought between 18 March 2022 and 21 April 2024 are credit-based, whatever their name. Legacy Standard included 600 credits a user and legacy Advanced included 750. A quick test helps here: if your Standard plan costs less than US$249, it is probably a legacy one, and the help center gives the example of a legacy Standard plan at US$199. Price changes take effect at renewal, and upgrading a legacy plan means accepting today's prices.

Extra users: where the bill quietly grows

Every self-serve plan includes one user, and Enterprise includes three. Beyond that, each extra seat has a price and a cap that depends on the plan, as the table shows. The last column is the plan price plus every extra user it allows, which is the most a fully staffed team would pay each month before add-ons. On Standard and above that figure is predictable. On Lite it is a ceiling rather than a fixed price, because seats are billed by how many credits each person uses.

How credit-based users are billed

On Lite, extra users are not a flat fee ^[3]. A user starts each month as Inactive and free. After 5 credits they become a Casual user, charged US$20, and after 100 credits they become a Power user, charged at the plan rate. Admins can cap each user's credits to control this. Without caps, a curious colleague can add to the bill, and because the charges land on the next renewal or on a separate pay-as-you-go invoice, the extra cost often surfaces a month after that colleague has stopped using the tool.

Inactive users cost nothing

Adding inactive users is free, but they can use only Site Audit and Rank Tracker. That is a useful way to let a developer see audit results or let a client follow rankings without paying for a seat. Only active users count against the plan's user limit. On Standard and above, every active user gets unlimited fair usage, which removes the per-user meter that makes Lite budgeting tricky.

Add-ons: Brand Radar, content and Project Boosts

The base plans cannot be customized, so anything beyond them comes as an add-on. Add-ons can be bought monthly or prepaid for a year, and annual add-ons get the same two-months-free discount as annual plans. On an annual plan, paying add-ons monthly needs a request to support, according to Ahrefs' pricing guide. The list has grown long, and several items matter mostly to specific buyers: AI visibility for brand teams, content tools for publishers, and boosts for anyone running one important site.

Brand Radar has no annual discount

Brand Radar's AI Visibility Index starts at US$199 a month. Grok is included in the All Indexes add-on or available separately at US$199 a month. Custom prompts are already part of paid plans from Lite, at 5, 10 or 20 prompts a day, and overage on the prompt packages runs from US$0.020 to US$0.010 per check. Brand Radar can even be bought alone, with an Ahrefs Free account. The pricing guide adds a rule the pricing page leaves out: "Brand Radar can only be purchased on a monthly basis (only Enterprise users can buy it annually)" ^[4]. So add US$199 a month at full price to any annual budget that includes AI visibility.

AI Content Helper and Project Boosts

AI Content Helper costs US$99 a month for 50 documents, according to the same guide, and on the pricing page it sits in a content add-on listed from US$99 a month. The free plan includes one document a month. For a blog publishing weekly, 50 documents is plenty; for an agency, it may not be. Project Boosts upgrade a single project, at US$20 a month for Pro and US$200 a month for Max. You do not need a paid subscription to buy one, which makes Max a way to get Patches on one site without a full plan. Each project takes one boost. They cannot be stacked.

Daily rank tracking is priced elsewhere

Every plan updates Rank Tracker weekly. Extra keywords can be bought as an add-on, and daily updates are a separate product, Rank Tracker Pro, which Ahrefs' blog says can be added to any plan. Its price is not on the visible pricing page, and that matters for comparisons, since Semrush tracks daily on its plans. Ask before buying if daily tracking matters to you, because this is the one cost you cannot read off the page in advance.

Pay-as-you-go, upgrades and expiry

Pay-as-you-go is off by default. Once you enable it, extra usage is charged automatically when consumption exceeds your plan's limits, and extra credits cost US$50 per 500. Your prepaid limits are always used first. Purchases of report credits, export rows, crawl credits and API units last three billing months, counting the current one, but the help center adds a condition: only if the subscription runs without interruptions and is renewed on time. A lapsed subscription can therefore wipe purchased credits. Keep it off unless you need it.

Upgrades are prorated. That works in your favor. Ahrefs charges only the difference between the two plans for the time left in the billing cycle, and the cycle date does not change. Upgrade with 10 days left and you pay the difference for those 10 days; the next invoice then shows the full new price. Downgrades and cancellations work the other way and wait for the end of the period. That asymmetry means moving up is cheap to try, while moving down takes a full cycle to show on the bill.

What a real bill looks like

Take a two-person content team on Lite, paying monthly, with Brand Radar. That is US$129 plus US$40 for the second user plus US$199 for Brand Radar, or US$368 a month before tax. On Standard, the same setup costs US$249 plus US$60 plus US$199, or US$508. The jump buys unlimited credits and Content Explorer. Over a year on monthly billing, the difference between the two setups comes to US$1,680. That is the same money as more than 33 packs of 500 extra credits at US$50 each on Lite, so heavy researchers usually come out ahead on Standard.

What costs nothing

A good share of Ahrefs is free, and it is worth using before you pay for anything. Ahrefs Free includes Site Explorer and Site Audit on verified sites, Web Analytics up to 1 million events a month, the Social Media Manager and the SEO Toolbar. Verified projects are free and unlimited on every plan. Bigger sites can raise Web Analytics capacity to 10 million or 100 million events with a Project Boost. Our guide to whether Ahrefs is free covers those limits in detail.

Refunds, discounts, taxes and payment

The money rules around the plans are strict, and the refund rule is the most important one to know before paying. "Ahrefs does not issue refunds in general." Monthly subscribers can request one if they have not used the service, and Ahrefs may still decline it. There is no money-back window for annual plans. Payments also renew automatically at the end of each period, so a one-month user must cancel before the renewal date.

Discounts are simpler. There are none. Ahrefs says it never runs them, and that includes Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There is no nonprofit pricing, codes found on coupon sites are not legitimate, and buying from resellers violates the Terms and can get an account blocked without a refund. Listed prices exclude sales tax, which Ahrefs charges in the US states and countries where it is registered. Prices are fixed in US dollars; paying in another currency uses an Ahrefs exchange rate that is updated from time to time, and you can ask support to pay in dollars instead. Ahrefs accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express and UnionPay. Wire transfer is reserved for Enterprise.

Ahrefs next to Semrush, and which plan to choose

Semrush's entry SEO plan is US$139 a month, so Ahrefs Lite is US$10 cheaper per month. On annual billing, Lite costs US$1,290 a year against US$1,407.96 for Semrush SEO, a gap of US$117.96. Both charge per extra user. The bigger difference is tracking: Semrush tracks rankings daily on its plans, while Ahrefs tracks weekly unless you add Rank Tracker Pro. Our Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison weighs the rest of the two tools.

Choosing a plan comes down to how often you research. Choose Starter for occasional checks on a few sites. Choose Lite if you work alone and need exports, API access and 750 tracked keywords. Choose Standard for anyone doing research every day, because unlimited credits remove the meter. Choose Advanced only when you need 5 years of history, Looker Studio or the agency directory. Enterprise is for teams that need SSO, audit logs and a negotiated contract.

The bottom line on price

Ahrefs is honest about its list prices and strict about everything around them. Budget for extra users, Brand Radar and any daily tracking on top of the plan, and keep pay-as-you-go off until you know your usage. Pay monthly until you are sure, since refunds are rare. Then switch to annual through support and save two months' price. For how the tool itself performs, read our Ahrefs review.