What happened
Ahrefs Lite launched at $79 a month in 2014, moved to $99 in a 2017 restructure, and stayed there for seven years. Then, on 22 April 2024, it went to $129 — a 30% increase in one step.
It was not only Lite. Standard went from $179 to $249, Advanced from $399 to $449, and Enterprise from $999 to $1,499. A 50% increase at the top end, on the same day.
The price was not the whole change. Ahrefs also tightened its credit system on the lower tiers, so that opening a report, running a keyword lookup, or applying a filter consumes an allowance. The Lite plan includes 1,000 credits a month. Exhaust them and you either stop working or pay overage.
Many published price histories date this change to April 2023. It was 2024 — the tier structure now on Ahrefs’ own pricing page ($129 / $249 / $449 / $1,499) is precisely the one introduced that April.
Why
Ahrefs runs its own web crawler, and that is genuinely expensive — a real index, updated continuously, is the product. The company cited infrastructure and database costs, and unlike most entries on this site the claim is plausible.
The credit system is the more consequential half. A flat monthly fee means heavy users are subsidised by light ones; metering ends that. It also converts a predictable bill into a variable one, which is harder to budget and easier to raise later without touching the headline price at all.
What you can do instead
Open SEO tooling that queries a data provider directly lets you pay for the lookups you make. The costs are usage-based rather than free — but they are yours to control.