The fees you pay for users depend on the amount of credits they consume each month. By controlling their credits usage, you can control your overall budget.
Usage cycle
Before learning how to control credits usage, make sure you understand how users and credits work.
In short, the usage cycle always looks like this:
At the beginning of a billing month, each user starts as Inactive with their usage reset to 0.
When a user starts using Ahrefs tools, their status gets upgraded to Casual and then to Power, which include up to 100 and up to 500 credits respectively. Fees for these upgrades are added to your balance on a pay-as-you-go basis.
As soon as a Power user consumes more than 500 credits, they start consuming additional credits from a pool shared by all workspace users. If there are credits available in the pool, the user will be able to consume them. Otherwise, 500 credits at $35 will be added on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Options to control usage
Now as you understand the logic, you have three options to control usage in your workspace.
Limit additional pay-as-you-go credits. This limits the amount of credits that can be added to the shared pool each month. With this, after exceeding 500 credits, power users in your workspace will only have a certain amount of credits to consume.
Disable additional pay-as-you-go credits altogether. This prevents power users from consuming more than 500 credits, unless you have prepaid for a certain amount of additional credits.
Limit individual users. In addition to the first or second option, you can also limit the usage of specific users. You can set a limit of 5, 100 or 500 credits so that they are not able to go beyond the Inactive, Casual or Power usage levels respectively. You can also set a limit at an arbitrary number above 500 credits. This will allow a Power user to consume 500 included credits and the rest will be consumed from a shared pool if available.
How to set limits
Go to Account settings > Limits & usage
Click Set limits in the Credits by user section
In the pop-up window that appears, you can set limits for individual users as well as limit or disable additional pay-as-you-go credits
Reaching limits
When limits are reached, users will not be able to use tools that consume credits until the end of the billing month (when the usage resets to 0). They will still be able to use Site Audit and Rank Tracker.