Seats, credits and limits: the three meters you are billed on

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A pricing page looks like a list of prices. It is usually a list of meters — and the one that runs out first decides what you actually pay.

There are three, and most tools use at least two.

1. Seats

How many people can log in. The commonest meter and the easiest to forget, because the advertised price almost always includes exactly one.

It has a hidden edge: seats are often capped per plan, not just priced. Ahrefs, checked on 24 September 2026, allows up to two extra users on Lite and up to five on Standard. Hit the cap and your only route is the next plan up, which is a much bigger step than one more seat.

2. Credits

A budget of actions that refills, usually monthly. Crawls, lookups, exports, API calls, AI generations — whatever the tool does that costs it money to do.

Ahrefs publishes 100,000 crawl credits a month on Lite and 500,000 on Standard. The important property of credits is that they are pooled across your whole account, so they do not stretch as your team grows. One person's bulk export can empty a month's budget for everyone.

Credits are also where surprise bills live. Check what happens when they run out: does the tool stop, or does it keep going and charge you?

3. Limits

Standing capacities rather than a monthly allowance: projects, tracked keywords, stored history, storage. Ahrefs lists 5 projects and 750 tracked keywords on Lite, 20 and 2,000 on Standard. Semrush's SEO plan lists 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily.

Limits are what quietly decide whether a plan fits. A plan with plenty of seats and generous credits is still wrong if it tracks 500 keywords and you have 900.

How to read a plan in two minutes

1. Find the meter you will hit first. Not the cheapest plan — the plan whose tightest meter is still comfortably above what you need. That is the real price.
2. Multiply the seats. Headline price plus extra seats, at your actual headcount, not today's.
3. Check the cap, not just the cost. A seat you cannot buy at any price forces a plan upgrade.
4. Ask what happens at zero. A tool that stops is a nuisance. A tool that keeps billing is a problem.

Our software cost calculator will do the arithmetic once you have those numbers:

Figures on this page were checked on 24 September 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page and will drift. The method does not.