Quick answer
Yes — Linkguard is a one-time-purchase alternative to Ahrefs Site Audit. It costs $24 once, while Ahrefs Site Audit runs $99+/mo — about $1,188 per year, every year. Crawl your whole site for broken links and redirect chains, with scheduled re-checks and diffs. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Ahrefs Site Audit's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Linkguard if you are an individual or small team paying Ahrefs Site Audit $99+/mo for work your own machine can do. Less than one month of Ahrefs covers Linkguard outright, and it never bills you again no matter how many pages you crawl.
Stay with Ahrefs Site Audit if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Linkguard does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| 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 |
| 5-year cost | $24 | $5,940 |
Where Ahrefs Site Audit still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Ahrefs Site Audit's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Ahrefs Site Audit is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Linkguard wins
- Price, permanently. $24 once versus $1,188/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- 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.
The math
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.
Common 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.
Try Linkguard — $24, one time
Or get Linkguard plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.