The price anchor
| Linkguard | Ahrefs Site Audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $99+/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $1,188 |
| 5-year total | $24 | $5,940 |
| 10-year total | $24 | $11,880 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($99+/mo, ~$1,188/yr); the Linkguard column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
Less than one month of Ahrefs covers Linkguard outright, and it never bills you again no matter how many pages you crawl.
- After 1 year: Linkguard has cost you $24 total — Ahrefs Site Audit has cost $1,188.
- After 3 years: Linkguard is still $24 — the subscription is at $3,564.
- After 5 years: Linkguard is still $24 — the subscription is at $5,940.
What you get for $24 once
- Real crawler. Give it a start URL plus depth and page limits and it walks your internal pages with undici, no headless browser, checking every internal and external link it finds.
- Redirect-chain analysis. Follows redirects hop by hop, stores the full chain, and flags anything over two hops so you catch link-equity leaks.
- Filterable results table. URL, status code, hops, link text and the pages each link was found on, filterable to broken, redirects, over two hops, or OK.
- Scheduled re-crawls with diffs. Daily or weekly re-scans diffed against the last run, so you get new-broken-links-since-last-scan instead of a raw dump.
- Email alerts only on new breaks. SMTP alerts fire only when new broken links appear, so there is no alert fatigue.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $24 is the whole price.
Pricing questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes. Linkguard is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/broken-link-checker-mvp and always will be. The $24 buys the packaged 1-click installer and setup; building from source is free.
Where does my scan data live?
In a SQLite file on your own server. Nothing is uploaded to us or anyone else, so your crawl data never leaves your infrastructure.
Is there a page or crawl limit?
No metered limit like the subscriptions charge for. Your crawl size is bounded only by your own hardware.
Is this a subscription in disguise?
No. $24 once, no renewal, no license server phoning home. Deploy it and it keeps working.
Linkguard — $24, one time
Or get Linkguard plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.