Free domain backlink checker calls and what each publish costs
Four actions are free, the rest are priced in credits of $0.0001. Here is the whole price list, then the arithmetic for a CMS that publishes a few hundred or a few thousand times a month.
Contentin research team ·
Every action, its price and its place in a flow
One credit is $0.0001. Prices are per call, not per row.
Free does not mean unlimited in your design. Be careful. The free domain backlink checker actions carry no price, yet every call still costs your function time and your editor's patience. Set a timeout of a few seconds and stop there.
We do not publish a per-second ceiling on this page, so do not assume one in either direction. Build a queue, a timeout and a retry that gives up after two or three tries. That holds for any third-party API.
Rows are free; calls are not. A paid call is billed once whether it returns 10 rows or 1,000, and deep pagination stops at 50,000 rows. Pulling a full 50,000 means 50 calls of 1,000, so 100 credits, which is one cent.
Match the call to the moment. Editors want a quick answer while they type, so the webhook runbook keeps the free overview in the hook and moves heavier pulls to a nightly job. Weekly reports can use dr_distribution for a single credit.
Nothing here is a quote. Prices above are the per-call prices as they stand in October 2026, and your own volumes decide the bill. Read the pipeline myths before you set a cutoff that fires thousands of paid calls.
Last, mind the order of work. Free calls first, a paid call only when a rule fires, bulk calls at night. That ordering keeps a $100 gift lasting a long time even for a busy editorial team.
Three monthly volumes, worked through
Hypothetical sites chosen to show the maths. None of them is a real customer.
Scenario
Publishes
Recipe per publish
Credits
Dollars
Small docs site
200
refdomains once
400
$0.04
Marketing site with a blog
3,000
free overview, then backlinks once
6,000
$0.60
Large editorial site
50,000
refdomains and backlinks
200,000
$20.00
Nightly sweep, any size
30 runs
bulk_dr, 2,000 domains
30
$0.003
Against a subscription
Per-call pricing wins when volume is lumpy
Ahrefs sells API units inside subscriptions that start at $129 a month for 200,000 units, with at least 50 units per request. That caps you near 4,000 requests. The same 4,000 requests here at 2 credits are 8,000 credits, or $0.80. Keep the idempotency key in the same record as the date of the check, so one lookup answers both questions.
Ahrefs and Semrush remain the fuller products for keywords and rank tracking
We are narrower: link data, from our own index, refreshed about monthly
The sign-up gift of $100 is 1,000,000 credits, or 500,000 two-credit calls
Watch out for retries
A webhook that fires twice for one publish can double your spend. Key your check on the entry ID plus the publish version, and skip it if you already stored a note today. The runbook has the checklist.