WOW - I was appalled how Tim constructed his trap/argument, comparing costs to launch if I were to pay to outsource and use that imaginary budget to justify his grab for more of my cash. The reality is most niche sites are bootstrapped, so these costs are sweat equity. Having spent a lifetime in sales, this looked clumsy and out of touch. Tim says they 'did a study' on the cost of backlinks, so this clumsy strategy was fundamental to the price change, not just dreamed up on this podcast. The thinking is, 'gee, people are spending heaps on this and that and we should have a share of that spending'. That is not a sales strategy, that is a tantrum. You can command higher prices when you improve quality, add functionality, improve education and support - not just because you are jealous that your business is not as profitable another sector of a given industry. Tim claims they want to improve and expand on their functionality, but there are no specifics - they want us to pay now and wait and see what extra value they bring to the table. But the kicker for me was Tim saying: "The needs of beginners can be served by other tools." Okay, understood, Tim. I'm off then. Oh, but Tim, before I go, can I just suggest that if you want advanced users to make Hrefs their tool of choice, you need to be their tool of choice at the start of their journey. And if you just want to be used by companies and teams, you might think you don't need individual SEOs, but when individuals move into companies their influence their stack and you risk teams being influenced to move to other tools based on their preferences and you will not be in the room when that conversation happens. Build from the ground up, with individuals who then in turn form teams. Finally, Dimitri, how do you think this interview went for you?
Im done, before I start. In the middle of selecting tools, Ahrefs is OUT. Can't believe your points in this day and age it's like 2000's stuff, baby companies run by 😭, lucky the bank balance is working. Could be a mutual Affiliate Circle to, we pay x in comms so we have to charge more in fees. Nice Post Simon. 🐾🐾🐾🕳 Thank G0D I borrow from the Guild of Church Meeces. (Mice, I know..., but "Meeces to pieces" Mr. Jinx's line) 🐱
Squeeze is on: shows a lack of market analysis, (Reminds me of the Budweizer Syndrome) with the Chats and other AIs taking more coin, the SERP/BL tools are going to have to step up, we are a few lines of AI code away from them being replaced and becoming a store item for $20/mth in the Chat GPT store, they are sleeping at the wheel.
He compared Mailchimp pricing to Ahrefs, which is an even a worse analogy than the gym one. To compare content writing, development, and link building to SaaS is wild. Imagine Adobe charging designers any time the make an edit to their photo, and claim that if photographers can charge $10k, then they should too. I think this company completely lost sight at the expense of a loyal user base. This will be studied in universities as an example of a major business mistake and what NOT to do. I have been with ahrefs for over a decade, and its sad to say that our agency’s perspective and opinion of this company has completely changed. We are testing other alternatives.
These justifications are really wild. It's like a gas company saying, "Well, people are spending more on their houses and cars, so we deserve more money, too". This company is out of their minds and deserves the backlash they've been getting. And if the strategy works out, congrats I guess but the brand sentiment is going to take a shit.
They do deserve more money, but to fuck legacy users is absurd. The leap is too high from legacy to the standard plan. I hope ahrefs goes out of business
Thank you Gael, great episode. It convinced me even more to not go back to ahrefs 🙂Maybe time for you to create videos/tutorials using other tools (mangools, keysearch, semrush, ubersuggest, etc ...), the audience is asking for it 😉
16:07 onwards. Basically, he told starting bootstrap budget affiliate site owners to GFO Ahrefs. And yet people want to continue using it and complaining. They don't want you or care about such customers. They want the big fish with the big bucks. People don't engage on their posts because often they come off as rude and justifying everything rather than listening to people's pain points and doing something about it. 1:18:22 Again, no loyalty for you. It's a business. You don't pay you go. Time for them to make the big bucks.
I am really shocked at Tim’s responses. To me, it sounds like they are going to focus more on the institutional side of things versus the consumer. Small businesses like ours is what makes this business run. However, responding to your questions with the answers of it costs money to start a business is pretty ridiculous. They should just be honest and say they are no longer the tool for small businesses and startups and that is ok. As a customer for well over 10 years, I started at $79 a month now I am up to $219 per month just for myself and 1 user. It’s pretty insane that they don’t have better options. Maybe Tim should be the next president cause he spins just like a politician. Last I checked, when I first started with Ahrefs there is no way I could afford it and at a base price of $99 per month today; it will be hard. Like I said in another post, y’all are becoming too big to fail, it’s time to break Ahrefs up or just go ahead and cut off most of your users and make the intro price $199 which I know is what they are planning to do
True. And if they wanted to really focus on big agencies, they would not be offering the $99 plan, which is essentially useless. Same for their "usage-based pricing". Force me to pay $200 to have the option to pay further, instead of just remove plans and let it all be truly usage-based pricing model. They've been playing a lot of gacha games.
Their data is so off we dropped it before the changes occurred. Their big swanky office in Singapore, one of the the most expensive places to live in the world needs to be paid for obviously!
I love using ahrefs in a free, explorative way - but not anymore, i'm BLEEDING credits lol* (*FYI I AM STILL USING AHREFS - ppl think i dont. But it was just a shock seeing the credits tick away. So I feel like I'm less free and creative)
oh dont get me wrong - i STILLL use ahrefs - I just feel like I cant do it as free as before -but i asked for a log report of the last months to get a good inisght in how i use it @@ChristianSlagter
Here’s what I gathered. Ahrefs is not for the 9-5 dad trying to make a side hustle with limited budget and grow it into a full time job. I’m part of TASS, at least promote more affordable options. I get it’s hard to communicate major and complicated changes with credits - but you can’t blame the customer. It’s just bad PR, there’s always a better marketing solution. Do a video show the same task compared to other competitors and put a cost to each. If the credit system is better than it’ll show side by side - 3mins or less.
wow...the fundamental issue is the rug being pulled from under the customers feet. Today its $99, then overnight people are paying $150+. Inflation is around 3-5% so why hike the price like 50% overnight. We have not received any additional value for the price increase. Not difficult to understand right. The outcome of the recent changes just means I have downgraded and found workarounds for the functions that are no longer available to me. Its surprising how you can find free alternative methods when your piss*d off with someone
Great you guys did this interview. I'm a legacy user and since Ahrefs decided to exclude us out of new features and pushed us to the new system, I'm seeing more focus on cash then customer. For now I don't see any good alternatives for smaller marketing agencies, if someone has suggestions please let me know.
The crush of ahrefs well described in the innovator’s dilemma by Clayton Christensen. They will keep cutting parts that do not generate money and chase who pays more. And there competitors will take their places in vacated spaces. One “job of the customer” after another they will one day wake up realized that they lost in this race.
exactly! its reasonable all the reasoning they have its just dishearthening that basically they are saying that if you cant afford us there are other cheaper tools you can use. basically your bitch of a girlfriend having job and now leaving you for more successful man.
interesting... which GROUP-buy would you recommend, for actual use of REAL accessible tools,, as no doubt the credit system will mess up the GROUP buy too, right?
Wow talk about using your own bias to fit your pricing structure. I’m just getting started and I don’t have 99$ per month and on top of that I would use more searches because I don’t have the skills to do it economically as someone with experience.
I feel Gael is trying to help/question affiliates newcomer to be able to use ahref at lower cost but Tim's business perspective and his response seem to be targeting big enterprise, agencies which are using their tools and I can fully understand that. Perhaps Ahref has the data comparison between enterprise vs small user in terms of longevity - how long/much they use, subscribe/unsubscribe. Henceforth which I think Ahref came into conclusion that they should go after enterprise instead of individual users for long term business revenue. This could be why more and newer tools/competitors are out. That being said, for new affiliates user should not use ahref until they start making money which I guess that would be the advice for now.
You shouldn’t have done interview. With your conflict of interest it just looks like damage control. Your hardball questions Poor answers with no pushback, disappointing. My questions for you though is. If ahrefs is changing to a model where they focus on the big companies and rich webmasters that can afford their obnoxious price model, and your course is aimed at getting people to transition From their 9-5 income, how are you going to sell that to your students that can’t afford it ?
I did the interview because so many people seemed to be "affected" by the changes and I found Ahrefs explanation a bit poor, so I wanted to get to the bottom of it and what their intentions were. There was pushback where I felt it was justified, like at 10:54, when I tried to demonstrate that, particularly for keyword research, the credit system is really not competitive. For other things like their strategy, I'm not sure what there is to push back against, it's their company, they're free to take it in whatever direction they want, but at least many things that were sometimes implied were made clear and official through this discussion at least. As for using Ahrefs in our courses, we've rebought all the tools in the market to test them against Ahrefs and still found most to be much worse in terms of data quality and/or usability. We decided to keep using Ahrefs BUT we've released new lessons this January highlighting all the alternative ways to execute many common tasks needed in the course without using Ahref's credit, allowing most students to be able to complete the course without the need to purchase more credits (and pay the same price as before the price increase). If the situation changes further, we'll adjust and maybe replace Ahrefs in the training. For now, with these updates, the price to complete the course is the same as before the price increase.
@@AuthorityHacker You wanted to get to the bottom of it and find the intentions of ahrefs, fine. But after doing this interview, you knew that this interview adds no value to your podcast subscribers. Yet, you decided to spend the time and money to edit and post it on your podcast. I agree with EAhysteria, this just looks like a damage control attempt.
It looks like Ahrefs are cashing in! As the saying goes they are "Making Hay while the Sun shines" Ai is improving day by day some great minds are already being creative with seo and Ai . Ahrefs has some great tools but their accurate search data has always been questionble. Jump forward 12 months and the landscape could look very different and Ahrefs will either fall by the way side for the smaller seo or realise we are their bread and butter.
Buddy, it's the small start-up affiliates that you want to hook on your software. You want them using AHREFS as they build their business into a large affiliate business. You are alienating the future of the business and it'll come back to haunt you. Gael, basically what I heard here is that you should find other options in the course for new affiliates and stop pushing AHREFS for everybody. By their own admission they are not for beginners. He keeps pulling these large start-up costs from what you're talking about even though you keep telling him that most new affiliates don't pay those costs and do it themselves. AH should start supporting another business for beginners and leave AHREFS for their target market. Good luck to them as the beginners build into agencies and won't touch AHREFS.
I love that you doing this for us, especially when you two companies have and had a lot of collaboration with each other and obviously are friends. This is what make AH unique, and you really doing it as a passion. Ofcourse as a small authority SEO affiliater who would love to this full time (and that's a goal). It's not possible for me yet to be using their credit system because my DR is not that high, tbh it's Quiet high to consider the low time I been in the business for. Anyway I understand Ahrefs as well, they had put soooo much money and effort in their entire system so they have to charge more. I would probably do the same, I mean hey look Apple. My suggestion would be to have a secondary site for us ordinary SEO ppl, which is not getting the keywords as fast as the ordinary pro version. Then you can do easily charge me $60-70/per month. But lite version with 500 coins for $99..? Cmon guys. You don't have that many high-end company customers that thay will make you the same amount of all the small SEOs
A couple of months ago, I had an interaction with Ahrefs customer support that left me completely shocked at their utter apathy and couldn't-care-less attitude. But watching this video is eye-opening. It's clearly a top-down problem. Holy cow! Imagine having a reputation problem for your brand, and the guy you send to represent your brand in an interview is as tone-deaf as this guy. Unsurprisingly, their Trustpilot rating stands at 1.9 out of 5 stars averaged over 220 reviews, as of this writing. Much credit to Authority Hackers for posting the full, unedited conversation. I was unsure until now, but I'm clearly not going to continue with Ahrefs anymore.
Great interview Gael. They have completely ignopred the psychology aspect. The pricing model itself isn't that bad. BUT forcing your customers to completely change their behaviour, against their will, is a recipe for disaster.
This is a very useful interview. We have a small SEO SaaS business and its always nice to get insights from someone like Tim about decision making even when its tough and alienates a lot of old customers.
no one's calling it X hahaha. Great great interview. I understand both sides, but I felt kinda backstabbed when I was just working with my filters and I was getting credits deducted. Maybe the bar is too high. But whatever, they are cutting the fat and making you pay at least +35 for additional credits a month.
Gael, What is the purpose of this video? Did you expect ahrefs to make any changes in their credit system? Basically, Tim's response was that, ahrefs doesn't care about Authority Hacker subscribers and they are looking for bigger players as customers. I can understand Tim; it is a business decision. But why would you do this podcast which delivers no value to your audience? In essence, this is a podcast that was an attempt to restore the reputation of ahrefs. A sponsored interview with sponsored ads from another sponsor in between.
Honestly the goal was just to clarify a situation that affected many people and have a bs free conversation of where ahrefs is going from there so people can decide if it’s for them or not. The fact is, I’ve observed people come In real life to Tim in CMSEO and most are too shy to ask challenging questions to him when mentioning the changes, I thought I was doing a service to them. There was no other goal for this episode and seeing how passionate people are about these changes, these are things that need to be discussed. Maybe I did it wrong, maybe there was a better way to tackle it, I just tried to talk about a relevant topic to the industry and that felt valuable enough 🤷♂️. Sorry if you didn’t love it, the next one goes back to our traditional format.
You should have got an INDIE journalist to do this (traded some press releases for an exclusive), or done a 3-way, with just being on side lines,"optimum allocation of resources to max effect", @@AuthorityHacker
you have compared the prices of articles + links in the US market and the cost of extra credits in Ahrefs. And yes it looks quite cheap. But let's compare the cost of links and good texts in other markets ... ?!? Or Ahrefs only works for users from US and other rich countries ? Maybe then we should make a pricing policy like Steam ?
Bear in mind that teh figures ahrefs isn't even close at times on the results it gives...... So you buy a rolls royce, but then you get charged extra for driving it AND it breaks down, is that okay to pay more for?
This business model doesn't make any sense to me. They are essentially saying that startups and small businesses should go elsewhere. But some of these will grow, and why would they then change if they are happy where they are. Meanwhile some of their existing customers will go elsewhere or even close their business for other reasons, what is the plan for replacing these customers? There are already smaller players in the market that are improving their tools every month and seem to really care about their customers. The attitude of saying that this tool costs less than buying a link or launching a site seems a bit bizarre when you aren't offering either of these services to your users. Your tool is cheaper than buying a new car but you don't sell them either! I think in general usage based pricing makes sense, if it really was a few hundred accounts that were half the usage of the platform then dealing with this would have been my answer to the problem not every user, and if you are going to affect every user why don't those that use the platform the least now pay less for it? This would attract new users that would be happy to pay more as they grow.
I'm so glad you addressed the elephant in the room! Just means other platforms can take over what ahrefs have thrown away! The Search engine is laughable! I guess they'll start charging per search in future!
Great interview with good challenging questions. I don’t really get everyone’s emotional responses to Ahrefs business model or change of direction. They need to do what’s best for them. I still use their product, albeit a few team members no longer have access because they were a little carefree with the credits.
I appreciate how Tim says it's affordable, but it's not for someone like me who isn't getting any income from my websites. And I agree that there's a lot of information overload. There needs to be better bite sized info. There may be tutorials but it was overwhelming trying to find it. And as for the updates, some companies do it well with making the information more accessible....Tim needs someone in usability (UX) to fix it.
LOL its madness, you have a core product that already is a brand you can tailor it OUT in 10 tiers without destroying the core and double your income. Sound like BS and Im tired of the business and what to sell it, to me.
Honest conversation. Disagree with some thoughts that he has but at least he is honest. Ultimately what google reward is money pages and you’ll have to respect that as a tool to help customers do their jobs
This CEO isn’t listening to the feedback. Lost me when he changed the subject at your first point. People have options. Just use a different service. You point out how credits are exhausted. I’m surprised he doesn’t say … well how much does a car cost. How much does a house cost. Let’s compare it with that. So a content creator creates something from scratch and it takes hour. Your program is a software that was built and now runs.
Got to 1:50 and turned it off. Ahrefs pays you for you advertising. Ahrefs knows they are screwing their customers. They are doing wrong and you are trying to monetize it. Unbelievable.
Oh my gosh! This is going to be a good episode.🍿The new credit system gives me anxiety, but I have been using Ahrefs since '14 and I'll be sticking around for now...
They built a company this big and got greedy that people using it were making a "lot of money". Most of these responses were straight up dumb. Glad I cancelled my subscription.
I like how straightforward Tim is, being not afraid to talk about his personal preferences and values and his perspective on things, even when it sounds surprising to some audiences, as per the comments under the video. Ahrefs has their 100% right to increase prices as a business. You have rather to adapt, or leave. Enjoyed the interview.
his argument about on-page seo tools is flawed, Glad Gael catched him, a lot of companies have writers that dont know or passionate about what they are writing, also AGENCIES, wtf, do you think an SEO agency knows everything about local businesses that clients dont even help in creating the content? his arguments are elitists, just because he doesnt use it therefore its of no use.
300 usd per pice of content for small affiliate? If some one thinks that's good price i can huck you with articles for halve of this price and will still make ton of money on it. And if lunching affiliate website would cost 10k no one would do this. You can find good writer for 1/10 of this price. I hit limit of ahrefs every month and i do have to go in saving mode after 2 weeks max and I'm small affiliate. finding good niche can easily burn couple hundred credits doing keyword research then for each keyword i think estimate is correct about 10-15 credits per topic.
To answer your Title in short. Yes they did! Grandfathered accounts are grandfathered price. It’s an unwritten rule in the SaaS industry, but ahrefs shi**ing on their grandfathered clients, unethical company!
he is just trying to justify by argumenting on other stuff. basically ahrefs is doing micro transactions lol. DUDE dont compare other use case to your pricing. its bullshit if you use so many credits just to use simple features that you have already paid for. you should just bumped your overall pricing.
Lot's of people in the comments can't stand the truth and prefer CMOs who tell them comfortable lies. Personally I can't stand hypocrisy. Love the man's honesty, he actually made me want to go back using Ahref.
On the Lite plan, you get 500 credits for $99, while the Standard and Advanced plans get 600 credits for $199 and 700 credits for $299 respectively. $99/500 credits = $0.198 per credit $199/600 credits = $0.331 per credit $299/700 credits = $0.427 per credit Regardless of which plan you're on, the cheapest credits you can buy and spend within the platform are the 500 credits you can add onto your account for $35: $35/500 credits = $0.07 per credit Setting aside the access to tools like Content Explorer that you gain or lose as you upgrade or downgrade your plan, why are the add-on credits so cheap compared to any of the monthly plans and why are the credits added each month to the accounts of users on the Advanced plan 115% more expensive than the credits added each month to the accounts of users on the Lite plan?
