Ahrefs for backlinks, or credits? Cost per authority point

Start with what each one sells

Ahrefs sells a research suite. The API is one door into it.

Its API units come inside subscriptions, from $129 a month for 200,000 units, and a request costs at least 50 units. At that floor, the plan buys at most 4,000 requests a month, which is about $0.032 each when you use every one.

LinkMidas sells link data and nothing else. Its refdomains call is 2 credits, or $0.0002, so on paper the unit price is roughly 160 times lower than the Ahrefs floor. That is true. It is also not the whole story, because the field reference shows what each cheap call leaves out.

Both figures are list prices as we understand them in October 2026. Plans change, so confirm before you budget.

Cost per authority point, done honestly

Divide cost by what you learn. For a valuation, what you learn is a DR number plus a breadth count.

Our DR costs $0 through the domain call and $0.0001 per 2,000 domains through bulk_dr. That makes the price of one authority reading effectively zero for a list of 50, and $0.00000005 each at the full 2,000.

Compare with care. The comparison to Ahrefs is not like for like, since their rating is a different number from ours. Never put the two in one column. Pick one source per decision, and if you switch, re-score everything.

Where Ahrefs wins is easy. It wins on depth. Keyword data, rank tracking and a daily crawl all live there. Where credits win is volume: if you screen 3,000 sellers once, the subscription allowance is the bottleneck and the credit model costs cents.

What $100 buys each way (an example)

Take the $100 sign-up credit. It is 1,000,000 credits, so it pays for 500,000 refdomains pulls, or a million bulk_dr screens of 2,000 domains each.

Nobody needs that many. A realistic month for a small agency might be 40 shortlists screened with bulk_dr, 300 refdomains pulls and 100 anchors pulls, which comes to 40 + 600 + 200 = 840 credits, or $0.084. These counts are an invented workload, chosen only to show the sum.

Set that beside a $129 monthly plan and the gap is plain. The plan is a research seat. The credits are a meter. Compare them only when you know which job you are buying for, and read the scoring model to see where the cheap calls fit into a decision.