why is ahrefs so expensive & is it worth the money?

Hi, I am Praneeth.

In this blog you will learn everything related to Ahrefs, top features, cost of Ahrefs, why is Ahrefs so expensive, is Ahrefs worth the money, and Ahrefs alternatives in detail.

Without further ado let’s get started

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What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is a well known popular SEO tool which is popular for its backlinks and SEO Analytics.

They got some amazing features which you will obviously learn in this blog, here is a quick list of the tools the Ahrefs SEO tool has,

1. Site explorer.
2. Content explorer.
3. Site audit.
4. Keywords explorer.
5. Rank tracker.

In the later parts of this blog, you will learn all the features within this section of tools and their top features quickly.

How much does Ahrefs cost?

As you can see in the image above which is the pricing of the tool,

They got 4 plans starting from,

• Lite plan which costs at 99$.
• Standard plan which costs at 179$.
• Advanced plan which costs at 399$.
• Agency plan which costs at 999$.

All of these plans are on monthly subscription plans,

Each plan has its own set of features and limitations on how much of the features and data you can access in the tool,

If you want to learn more about all the plans you can visit the website here to have a look at the plans and features in detail.

What is Ahrefs used for & Top features of Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is as said earlier used for SEO purposes,

Here are some top features and places where Ahrefs is very useful.

Note: By the way, we will only discuss the top features of Ahrefs as there are lots of small and big features which is not possible to mention all in the list.

S.No	Category.	Top features.
1.	Site explorer- Analyse your competitors.	Check your competitor link profile and their broken links, etc. Link intersect feature to create more opportunities for getting links. Refine results and top pages of your competitor filtering best by links. Check lost backlinks of your website. New backlinks feature to see backlinks for your website or your competitor for link building opportunity. Content gap feature is finding keywords your competitors rank for which you don’t. Paid traffic research to see if your competitors are using paid search advertising like SEM.
2.	Keywords explorer- Study what your customers are searching for.	Get total clicks percentage over no clicks of a keyword search volume. SERP history feature to check how rankings of a website for that term changed over time. Do keyword research for other search engines like YouTube, bing, yahoo, Baidu, etc.  Check keywords difficulty and estimate the number of backlinks you need to rank in the top 10 of Google and other search engines. Total search traffic estimation in SERP overview.
3.	Content explorer- Learn from your Industry’s top-performing content	Find highly shared content online. Find republished posts or updated posts that get more traffic. Analyze shares of the content with traffic it gets and the commercial value of the traffic it has. Find broken link building opportunities by finding broken dead pages and asking people to link you instead of them for that resource. Check content trends and your brand mentions over time.
4.	Organic growth-Check your growth online.	Check the organic traffic of your competitors. Check the total organic keywords you rank for in Google. Check the traffic value and commercial intent of your website traffic.
5.	Rank tracker- Track your ranking progress.	Get ranking updates of your blog in Google for both mobile and desktop in 170 different countries. Easily visualize your SEO progress in interactive graphs, check visibility, AVG position, and position distribution, like GSC. Check your blog’s ranks in snippets and people also ask and other SERP features or not.
6.	Site audit- Optimize your website.	Check site structure. Get URL info and some cool data like title, description, content length, indexability, canonicalization, duplicates Preset filters and find technical issues with your website within seconds. Fix redirection chain issues. Enhanced issue details and instructions on how to fix them.

Now that you know The top features of Ahrefs, here comes the main question,

Why is Ahrefs so expensive.

Let’s see the answer to the question in detail.

Why is Ahrefs so Expensive?

Many people compare Ahrefs with SEMrush but when it comes to price,

SEMrush buys data from other companies and is in partnerships and they have their additional expenses which make the tool expensive,

Whereas it is not the case with Ahrefs,

Ahrefs does not buy data from other companies as SEMrush does rather it goes one step ahead and crawls the entire internet as Google does.

Yes.

It sounds crazy but that’s the fact.

According to the own words of Ahrefs they say,

We crawl the entire web 24/7 (much like search engines do) storing petabytes of information about live websites — how they link to each other and what keywords they rank for in search results.

We process large amounts of clickstream data to maintain the world’s largest third-party database of search queries, with estimated monthly search volume and advanced keyword research metrics.

We’re proud of our backend infrastructure. All existing solutions couldn’t keep up with the volume of data that we operate, so we had to custom build the larger part of our software infrastructure in-house.

At present, their infrastructure contains, 

• 2000 servers.
• 100k CPU cores.
• 600TB ram.
• 50PB SSD.
• 30PB HDD.

Here are some cool numbers according to Ahrefs itself.

Note: All the numbers are from Ahrefs itself here.

1. Content index.

Ahrefs content explorer is a mini search engine in itself.

The stats are that, 

• Every 24 hours 30 million new pages are discovered.
• Every 24 hours Ahrefs update its metrics of 350 million pages.

Now let’s talk about keywords.

2. Keywords index.

Unlike Semrush and most other SEO tools on the internet, 

Ahrefs enables you to do keyword research for over 10 different search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon, etc.

The stat is that,

• 11.6 billion keywords. 10 search engines. 229 countries their keywords index has.

3. Backlink index.

Unlike any other SEO tool, Ahrefs boasts the world’s largest index of live backlinks. 

Ahrefs updates it with fresh data every 15-30 minutes.

Because the data gets updated every half an hour there is no fixed figure of total backlinks number and figure in its database as it changes every hour, 

You can check the exact figure of backlinks after every update lives on their website here.

Now comes the question why is Ahrefs so expensive?

The answer lies in its expenses.

Ahrefs crawls the entire web-like search engines or smaller version of Google but frequently every hour and every day to get the amazing data it has in its tools.

It takes a lot of money, effort, and time to do that and to maintain that.

Google is the largest search engine in the industry because they focus on their technology a lot and hire thousands of engineers to regulate things.

They invest millions of dollars in their technology, algorithms, that is the reason they are successful in that.

The same applies to Ahrefs but on a smaller scale.

Ahrefs also has to keep up with their expenses in updating its technology, infrastructure and their customer support.

All of it comes at its price tag.

Hence the awesome data you get with Ahrefs, to make that data easily accessible for you, takes a lot of time and effort for Ahrefs team behind the scenes.

You know all those have their price tag.

Hence, Ahrefs is what it is, it is that expensive.

Is Ahrefs worth the money?

Absolutely yes.

Ahrefs is definitely worth the money.

Because of the data that gets updated every day and every hour you don’t have any other tool that updates the data so frequently.

There are some awesome features that you get in this tool for the price point like,

• Be it search volume and keyword difficulty.
• Be it clicks both organic and paid.
• Be it backlinks data.
• Be it an awesome content gap tool.
• Be it a site audit feature.
• Be it link building opportunities.
• Keyword research for 9 other search engines than Google.

You can click here to see the top features that you will only see in Ahrefs.

Can I use Ahrefs for free?

No.

There is no free trial for Ahrefs like you would expect to have in SEMrush or Moz.

You have the option of a 7 day trial for 7 dollars.

You can have complete access to the tool depending on the plan you selected For 7 days.

Despite the main tools of Ahrefs, You can have access to many tools of Ahrefs for free.

Tools like these,

1. Ahrefs keyword generator.
2. Ahrefs SEO toolbar.
3. Ahrefs backlink checker.
4. Ahrefs Broken link checker.
5. Ahrefs webmasters tool.
6. Ahrefs SERP checker.
7. Ahrefs WordPress SEO plugin.
8. Website authority checker.
9. Keyword difficulty checker.

The data you can extract from these free tools is limited by it is awesome because the data comes straight from the premium tool features but limited in access.

You can get access to the features and tools in the footer section of the official Ahrefs website.

5 best Ahrefs alternatives.

Although Ahrefs is the best and unique SEO tool.

There are a couple of competitors and alternatives to the tool.

Here are the top alternatives to the tool.

1. Ubersuggest.
2. Semrush.
3. Monitor Backlinks.
4. Mangools.
5. Moz pro.

For more details of the alternatives to the tool, You can click here.

With that said let’s end the blog.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered everything related to why is Ahrefs so expensive and is Ahrefs worth the money and Ahrefs alternatives in detail.

Do comment down what do you think about the tool in the comments section below.

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Read my other blogs.

• Why is Semrush so expensive?
• Pros and cons of SEO tools.
• How to start a blog?

I will catch you next time till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.