Check backlink free first, then spend the $100 on purpose
Four actions cost nothing. The starter balance is 1,000,000 credits. These budgets show how far that goes for typical developer projects.
The price list in one place
Prepaid, no subscription, no monthly minimum. One credit is $0.0001.
Link rows
2 credits
refdomains,backlinks,anchorstoppages,anchor_cloudintersectfor 2 to 10 domains
Three budgets, all hypothetical
These are planning examples, not reports from real accounts. Change the volumes and the arithmetic still holds, so substitute your own.
Budget A, a public widget. A free DR checker on your blog uses domain, which costs 0 credits. Ten thousand lookups a month are free at the API, and the only bill you face is hosting, which has nothing to do with us.
Budget B, an agency report. Monthly, 300 client domains, one refdomains call each at 2 credits. That is 600 credits a month and 7,200 a year, or $0.72. Small. The $100 balance would cover roughly 139 years at that rate, so storage and your own time dominate, not the API.
Budget C, a full export. One domain, 50 calls of 1,000 rows to reach the 50,000 cap, at 2 credits each: 100 credits, or one cent. Repeat for 1,000 domains and you spend 100,000 credits, which is $10 of the $100 and a tenth of the balance.
Notice what is missing: a monthly plan. There is no subscription to renew, and you pay for calls, not seats. Cheap. Every budget leans on the same fact. The bulk script and the paging notes show the code behind those call counts.
Same money, another vendor
| SEOMasters.dev API | Ahrefs API (as quoted) | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry point | $0, then prepaid credit | From $129 a month |
| Allowance | 1,000,000 credits free at sign-up | 200,000 units a month |
| Minimum per request | None; free actions cost 0 | At least 50 units |
| Most requests per month at that minimum | Not applicable | 4,000 |
| Keywords, rank tracking, daily crawl | Not offered | Yes, and Semrush offers them too |
Where we would put it
Spend on monthly deep pulls, keep the rest free
Because the index refreshes about once a month, anything more frequent than monthly repeats yesterday's answer. Schedule paid pulls monthly and let the four no-key actions carry day-to-day lookups.
- Cache free calls for a day
- Allow-list paid actions in code
- Log
_creditsafter every call - Top up in USDT (TRC-20) only when the balance warrants it
Money questions
- Does the $100 expire?
- The material we hold for this site does not give an expiry, so we do not state one. Check the account page, which shows your balance and activity, before you plan a long-running job.
- Is a card needed to start?
- No. Sign in with a Google account and the $100 credit is added without a card. Later top-ups are made in USDT on the TRC-20 network from the account page.