Nobody tells you what a link actually costs.
That is most of the business model. Publishers are typically paid a little over $100. Agencies bill thousands a month for the same placements. Both numbers are published, they are just never shown next to each other.
Under 2% of paid link inventory is worth buying. Finding the rest is the job you are paying for.
Median paid to a publisher
Across 22,703 completed placements
Uplift buying through a vendor
$295 direct against $461 via a vendor, same dataset
Agency retainers, per month
For 7 to 28 links, so $210 to $536 each
Of paid inventory is any good
Of a 500,000-site database
What the site owner is actually paid.
Datasets and marketplaces publishing their own transaction data, not estimates. Every figure links to its source.
What agencies charge for the same placements.
Read off each company’s published rate card on 11 August 2026. Where a package states a link count, the per-link figure is arithmetic on their numbers.
Where the difference goes.
There is exactly one published like-for-like comparison of the same placement bought both ways, and it is a 56% uplift. Retainer pricing is far wider than that.
Per link, that is roughly double, and we are not going to inflate it. The one clean like-for-like measurement is BuzzStream’s: across more than 500,000 guest post sites the same link costs $295 direct from the publisher and $461 through a vendor, a 56% uplift.
The retainer is where it stops being checkable. A monthly package at $2,999 for 7 links is $428 each against a publisher fee nearer $112, but no retainer discloses the split, so you cannot tell what you paid for a link and what you paid for the work. We looked for a published figure on that split and could not find one that stands up. Nobody measures it, which is rather the point.
The work is real. That is not the argument.
Qualifying publishers is most of the job, and there is no market price to look up.
The same domain sells for 147% more on the dearest marketplace than the cheapest, and 40% of domains listed in more than one place differ by over 100%. So the objection is not that agencies charge for work. It is that the fee for the work and the fee for the placement arrive as one number, and only one of them is disclosed.
How we do it instead.
The usual model
- One monthly fee covering outreach and placements together
- A promised number of links, in a DR band
- The publisher fee sits inside that number and is never shown
- You cannot tell what a link cost or what the work cost
- Published rates: $2,999 to $15,000 a month
What we do
- The retainer pays for outreach, qualifying and negotiating
- Publisher fees passed through at cost, with the quote attached
- You see the site, its DR, the price and the cost per point before we buy
- We tell you which ones are bad value and recommend against them
- Nothing added to the placement price. Ever.
To be explicit about our own interest: we charge a monthly retainer too, so this is not an argument that agencies are useless or that cheap is better. It is an argument that you should be able to see which part of the bill bought a link and which part bought the work.
Common questions.
How much does a backlink cost in 2026?
Across 22,703 completed placements on one marketplace the median price paid was $112 and the average $161. A separate analysis of 52,671 sites found publishers ask $929 on average while buyers typically pay $207. The asking price and the transacted price are different numbers.
How much do link building agencies charge?
Published rate cards run from $2,999 a month for 7 to 8 links up to $15,000 a month for 28. Per link that is roughly $210 to $536, with one agency quoting $500 to $1,250 and another valuing a DR 60+ link at $600 to $900.
Why is there a gap between what publishers charge and what agencies bill?
Part of it is real work. Finding and qualifying publishers is most of the job, and one 500,000-site database showed only 1.37% of paid placement inventory clears a serious quality bar. The rest is markup on the placement fee, and almost nobody itemises which part is which.
Is buying links worth it at those prices?
That depends entirely on what you pay per point of authority, not per link. A cheap link on a weak site can cost more per point of Domain Rating than an expensive one on a strong site, which is why the price alone tells you very little.
What does GrowthManager charge for links?
Nothing on top of the publisher fee. The retainer already pays for the outreach, the qualifying and the negotiating, so placement costs are passed through at what the publisher actually charged, with the quote attached.
See what your links should cost.
Thirty minutes. We will show you what your competitors are paying for links, and what the same authority costs at the publisher’s own price.
Market rates were read off each source page on 11 August 2026, and each carries its own publication date, which in a couple of cases is older than this page. Figures are as published, in the currency published, and are not converted. Rates change; check the source before quoting any figure here.