Ahrefs Site Audit is bundled at $99+ a month — around $1,188 a year to keep a crawler that is, underneath, an HTTP client and a cron job. Dr. Link Check wants $14.90+/mo for the same idea. Linkguard is that HTTP client and that cron job: it walks your pages, checks every internal and external link, follows redirect chains, and re-scans on a schedule with a diff. $24, once, on your own box.

• Real crawler — Give it a start URL plus depth and page limits and it walks your internal pages with undici, no headless browser, checking every internal and external link it finds.

• Redirect-chain analysis — Follows redirects hop by hop, stores the full chain, and flags anything over two hops so you catch link-equity leaks.

• Filterable results table — URL, status code, hops, link text and the pages each link was found on, filterable to broken, redirects, over two hops, or OK.

• Scheduled re-crawls with diffs — Daily or weekly re-scans diffed against the last run, so you get new-broken-links-since-last-scan instead of a raw dump.

• Email alerts only on new breaks — SMTP alerts fire only when new broken links appear, so there is no alert fatigue.

• CSV export — Export any scan to CSV for client reports.

Runs as a Windows desktop app or on any $5 VPS (Docker included).

What's included:

• Full source code (MIT): https://github.com/bensblueprints/broken-link-checker

• Lifetime v1 updates

• Setup guide (README quick start)