the cheapest ahrefs alternative in 2026

of the seven tools on this page, the cheapest ahrefs alternative you can subscribe to is spyfu at $39/mo. the cheapest one you can own is crawlgraph at $99 paid once. those are two different answers to the same question, and which one is right depends on how long you intend to keep the tool. ahrefs costs $129/mo, so a one-time $99 pays for itself inside a single month. against spyfu it takes three. here are the numbers, and the arithmetic in between.

the question has two honest answers

people searching for the cheapest ahrefs alternative have usually already made the decision. the tool is good. the bill is the problem. $129 a month is $1,548 a year, and if what you actually open it for is a referring-domain list twice a week, that is an expensive list. the useful question is not which tool is best, it is what the smallest amount of money is that still gets you the link data. if you want the free end of that range first, start with how to find backlinks for free and come back here when you hit the export limits.

the split is simple. of the seven subscriptions compared on this page, spyfu is the cheapest at $39/mo. crawlgraph is the cheapest tool to own at $99 once. a subscription is never finished being paid. a one-time price is finished in month one against ahrefs and month three against spyfu, and then it is $0 for as long as you keep using it.

what the alternatives actually cost

entry-tier list prices, the same figures we publish on our comparison pages. the right-hand column is the one this query is really asking about: how many months of that subscription add up to $99 paid once.

three of the seven cost less in a single month than crawlgraph costs in total, and a fourth, moz, costs exactly the same. leaving those rows off would make the page shorter and the argument weaker. these are entry tiers, too. higher plans cost more and the comparison only gets more lopsided, so the table is quoting each competitor at its most favorable price.

the cheapest option is $0, up to a point

worth saying before any of the paid arithmetic: the floor for this query is free, and it is a real floor rather than a seven-day trial. the backlink gap analysis runs without an account, just an email, and returns your first 5 gaps; free runs are capped per ip address. a free api key gives you 15 backlink lookups a month. any domain returns its top 5 referring domains without an account. no card, no countdown.

what the $99 buys is exactly the part the free tier caps: the complete referring-domain list instead of the top 5, csv and json exports up to 100,000 rows, and api access that is not metered at 15 calls. if your real usage is one competitor check a month, the honest answer to “what is the cheapest ahrefs alternative” is $0, and you should not pay us either. the $99 is for the point where you want the rows out in bulk.

the break-even arithmetic

break-even is one division: $99 divided by the competitor's monthly price, rounded up to the next whole month.

• semrush, $140/mo - 1 month. you are ahead from day 31.
• ahrefs, $129/mo - 1 month.
• se ranking, $103/mo - 1 month.
• moz, $99/mo - 1 month, to the dollar.
• serpstat, $69/mo - 2 months.
• majestic, $50/mo - 2 months.
• spyfu, $39/mo - 3 months.

the longest break-even on the list is three months. past that the comparison stops being close. year one against ahrefs is $1,548 versus $99, a difference of $1,449. year three is $4,644 versus $99. even against spyfu, the cheapest of the seven subscriptions on this page, three years is $1,404 versus $99.

the fair objection to any lifetime price is that lifetime means the company's lifetime, not yours. worth saying plainly: crawlgraph is a thin layer over the public common crawl hyperlink graph, the methodology is published rather than proprietary, and every query exports to csv or json. if we disappeared tomorrow the underlying dataset would still be free and public, and your exports would still be on your disk. that is a weaker promise than a company that will obviously outlive you, and a stronger one than a lifetime deal built on data only the vendor can see.

the arithmetic only holds if the cheap tool does the job you bought it for. that is the next section, and it is the part most cheapest-alternative posts skip.

what you give up when you cancel ahrefs

ahrefs at $129/mo is not overpriced for what it is. it is four products sold as one, and $99 once buys exactly one of them.

• rank tracking. gone completely. crawlgraph does not track a single keyword position. if you need daily positions, buy a rank tracker.
• site audit. gone. no crawl of your own site, no broken-link report, no technical issue list.
• keyword research. gone. no search volumes, no difficulty scores, no serp history, no content gap by keyword.
• a continuously refreshed index. ahrefs runs its own crawler and re-crawls constantly. crawlgraph reads the common crawl hyperlink graph, roughly 121.1M domains and 3.90B links, republished quarterly. a link that appears on a thursday shows up in ahrefs by friday. in a quarterly snapshot it shows up when the next release lands.
• the cleanup layer. de-duplication, anchor normalization, spam filtering, re-validating that links are still live. common crawl publishes the graph as it found it, and we do not add a cleanup pass on top.

who should not switch

stay where you are, or buy a cheaper suite rather than a one-off backlink tool, if any of these describe you:

• you report weekly rank movement to a client or a boss. that is a rank tracker job and nothing on the $99 side of this page does it.
• keyword research is what you actually open the tool for. serpstat at $69/mo is a better trade than $99 for a backlink tool with no keyword data at all: it bundles volumes, rank tracking and a site audit for less than a month of ahrefs. if what you want is ppc and competitor ad intelligence, that is spyfu's specialty at $39/mo.
• you need new-link and lost-link alerts within days of them happening.
• you quote a recognized authority number to prospects. moz at $99/mo owns that vocabulary, and our percentile is not the number your client will recognize.

none of that is a price argument. paying $39 for the wrong tool costs more than paying $129 for the right one.

who the $99 is actually for

the profile is narrow and worth stating precisely:

• the thing you open ahrefs for is the list of domains linking to a competitor.
• you look at it monthly, or per campaign, not hourly.
• you want the rows out of the tool: csv or json, into a sheet, a sequencer, or a script.
• the $1,548/yr line item is not returning $1,548 of work.

if three of those four are true, your cheapest option is not a smaller subscription. it is no subscription. and you do not have to take the data quality on trust before paying: run a domain and read what comes back.

one practical note before you cancel anything: export what you cannot get back. ahrefs holds your saved projects, your historical link data, and whatever rank history you have accumulated, and none of that survives the cancellation. pull those csvs while the subscription is still live, then cancel. an open-graph tool can rebuild a competitor's referring-domain list any time you ask it to. it cannot rebuild two years of your own tracked history.

the verdict

cheapest per month of the seven: spyfu, $39. cheapest per year: spyfu again, $468. cheapest to own: crawlgraph, $99, once, which breaks even inside one month against ahrefs and inside three months against every other tool on the list. if you need rank tracking, keyword volumes, or a link index refreshed daily, none of these prices matter and you should keep paying ahrefs $129 a month. if what you need is the referring domains and a clean export, the $99 has finished paying for itself before the next common crawl release lands. the full side-by-side with the other six vendors sits on the free ahrefs alternative page.