What happened
Semrush Pro sat at $99.95 a month from 2015 until late 2021 — six years unchanged. Since then it has moved three times, reaching $139.95. Forty percent overall, all of it packed into the last four years.
November 2021 brought $119.95, the first increase in six years. July 2023 took it to $129.95, but only for new and returning customers; anyone already subscribed kept the old rate. July 2024 brought $139.95.
That 2023 detail is the one that matters, and it is why comparing notes with a colleague can be so confusing. For a stretch, two people on the same plan were paying different amounts purely by signup date.
Why
Semrush went public in March 2021. The first increase in six years followed that November, and the timing is not coincidence: public companies are measured on revenue per customer every quarter, and a price that has not moved since 2015 is the easiest number to fix.
Grandfathering existing customers is the tactic that makes it work. Long-standing subscribers, the ones most likely to complain publicly or churn, feel nothing. New customers have no reference point for what the tool used to cost. The increase is fully collected within a year or two through natural turnover, without a single angry thread.
The 2024 increase dropped that protection and applied to everyone.
What you can do instead
Much of what SEO suites sell is access to crawl data, which genuinely costs money to gather. But open tooling can pull the same data on a pay-as-you-go basis, so you fund the queries you actually run instead of a flat monthly fee.