Ahrefs Site Audit costs $99+/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $3,564 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$99+/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Linkguard: the pay-once alternative
Linkguard does the same core job for $24, once. Crawl your whole site for broken links and redirect chains, with scheduled re-checks and diffs.
| Linkguard | Ahrefs Site Audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $24 once | $99+/mo |
| 1 year | $24 | $1,188+ |
| Broken link detection | Yes | Yes |
| Redirect chains + hop flagging | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled re-checks + diff | Yes | Yes |
| Email alerts | Yes | Yes |
| CSV export | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted, data stays yours | Yes | No |
Less than one month of Ahrefs covers Linkguard outright, and it never bills you again no matter how many pages you crawl.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Ahrefs Site Audit's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Linkguard is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Linkguard — $24, once
Crawl your whole site for broken links and redirect chains, with scheduled re-checks and diffs.