🤬 Ahrefs Thinks You're Stupid

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I’ve had an Ahrefs account under one of my Skipblast Digital emails since March of 2019. Before I that, I had an account for several years under a personal email address.

And I’m well aware of how they’ve treated legacy users with the change over to the credits system and then the end of the credits system to what they offer now.

I’ve watched them add new features that my legacy account didn’t get access to.

I was a paying customer for those weird months at the end of 2019/early 2020 where they randomly charged US sales tax without ever refunding it.

But today, even knowing how shitty they’ve treated people in recent years, I was amazed by what they’ll do to fuck ya.

More on that in a moment.

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I Shouldn’t Be Surprised

As I mentioned, I have a legacy account, well I did until a few hours ago. That account has cost me $179/month since March 2019.

Today I was using Ahrefs after taking the weekend off, when I was shocked to see that I suddenly no longer had access to historical data older than two years.

I was literally looking at “5 Year” and “All” history as recent as two days ago. This restrictions makes the legacy account useless for me in terms of agency use.

That left me with the following options:

• upgrade to their new plans

• switch to Semrush full-time

A quick check shows me that the $249 plans on Ahrefs and Semrush is no comparison as I get full history with Semrush for that monthly fee and only 2 years with Ahrefs.

Easy, and inevitable, decision based on how they’ve been treating legacy users.

So, I went to cancel my Ahrefs account, which as luck would have it is set to renew tomorrow.

Cancelling gave me the message that I’d retain access until tomorrow.

That was a lie.

Ahrefs took away my account access immediately.

That was at 11am PST (this is important…) and I sent them an email as well as a message through their online chat.

The response? (and my reply)

My reply was sent at 12:36pm PST….which just happens to be 7:36pm UTC/GMT.

Like the internet doesn’t exist and you can’t check the current time in any time zone 🤡 How stupid do they think we are?

After asking if I was going to get my access back, they acted like they were doing me a favor.

No apology. And not access to more than 2 years of historical data, which I’d brought up at the start.

And so it ends. Don’t think I’ll ever use their product again after that.

Coming up…

Upcoming topics: more tips and ideas on Etsy and KDP, how it’s going with my chatGPT fiction ebook and the AI music thingie, and growing an ecomm site.

If you have a topic you want covered just reply and let me know.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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