Cost table
Bulk backlink checker cost table, per call and per dollar
One credit is $0.0001. This page turns that into calls per dollar, so you can budget a monthly link study before you write a line of code.
What each action costs
| Credits | Price per call | Calls per $1 | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | free | no key needed | domain, overview, stats, suggest |
| 1 | $0.0001 | 10,000 | bulk_dr (2,000 domains), compare (20), top, dr_distribution, tld_breakdown |
| 2 | $0.0002 | 5,000 | refdomains, backlinks, anchors, toppages, anchor_cloud, intersect (2 to 10 domains) |
| 3 | $0.0003 | about 3,333 | search, keyword |
Reading the table like an engineer
The unit that matters is the call, not the row. A page of 1,000 backlinks costs the same as a page of 10.
So the cheap strategy is to ask for full pages. Set per high, loop with page, and remember that deep pagination stops at 50,000 rows.
We publish no requests-per-second ceiling in this page, because we have no figure to quote. Write your client to back off on errors anyway: HTTP 401 means a missing or bad key, and HTTP 402 means the balance has run out.
Every authenticated response carries _credits with the cost and the balance left. Log it, and you will always know where the budget went.
Where the budget really goes
Most of the spend in a link-flow project is exploration, not production. You will run toppages for a dozen sites, discard half the output, and rerun with a higher per.
That is fine. At 2 credits a call, a thousand exploratory requests cost $0.20.
The bigger cost is the time it takes to read the results, and no pricing model changes that. What a low per-call price does change is your willingness to rerun a query when a result looks odd, instead of arguing with yourself about whether it is worth the units.
A monthly job is easy to size. One snapshot per client domain, using toppages and refdomains, is 4 credits per domain, so 200 client domains come to 800 credits, or $0.08 a month.
Three budgets, worked from the table
Examples with round numbers we chose. They are not customer figures.
Score 5,000 domains
Three bulk_dr calls cover 5,000 domains. That is 3 credits, or $0.0003.
Study ten rivals
Four 2-credit actions per rival is 8 credits, so 80 credits or $0.008 for all ten.
Monthly watchlist
A watchlist of 2,000 domains is one bulk_dr call a month, a single credit.
Spend the free credit
$100 is 1,000,000 credits. At 2 credits a call, that is 500,000 calls.
A scored batch in one request
GET works for short lists. For more, POST the domains in the body.
curl "https://linkisflow.com/api.php?action=bulk_dr&domains=ahrefs.com,moz.com,majestic.com&key=sk_live_..."Against a subscription API
Ahrefs sells API units inside subscriptions, from $129 a month for 200,000 units, and each request uses at least 50 units. That structure suits a team that lives in Ahrefs all day.
It suits link-flow work less well. A monthly snapshot of a few hundred entry pages would use a sliver of the allowance, and you would pay for the rest regardless.
Be fair about the other side. For keywords, rank tracking and daily-fresh crawling, Ahrefs or Semrush are the fuller products, and our index refreshes roughly monthly.
Our pitch is narrower, and the entry-page guide shows the main use: link data, at a low price per call, with no subscription and no monthly minimum.
For a worked comparison, see how the competitor gap study adds up: six credits for three calls.