Link Building Pricing for B2B SaaS in 2026: What Each Price Band Buys

Prices as published on each vendor's own site, read on 28 October 2026. Currencies as the vendor publishes them.

Link building prices in 2026: the vendor table

Every price below comes from the vendor's own site, rendered and read from the US on 28 October 2026, behind the pricing link and not from a roundup. I checked each price for a crossed-out anchor figure and found none. Where a vendor's /pricing link returned a 404, the price came from the page that actually carries it.

Three things to read before you compare rows. Sure Oak sets a "minimum DA 30+", a Moz score, while most others set a DR floor on Ahrefs' score, so a DA 30 bar and a DR 50 floor do not measure the same thing. Loganix uses both on one page: its package cards say "DA30 Average" and "DA40+ Average", and its tier comparison says "Average DR30 Domains" and "Average DR40+ Domains". saaslinkbuilder publishes in euros and FatJoe in pounds, so I left both in their own currency. And Above Apex's own page disagrees with itself: the plan card says $3,500 a month and its FAQ says $3,300 for the same 8 links.

The five ways link building is priced

Link building pricing comes in five shapes, and the unit tells you more than the number.

Per link or per placement. You pay for one link on one site. Rhino Rank and Respona sell this way. So do FatJoe and, beside its monthly plan, Above Apex. You pick the floor (DR, referring domains or traffic) and the vendor finds a site that clears it.

Productized monthly package. A fixed number of links a month for a fixed price. Most SaaS-focused vendors sell this way: Saasy Links, Editorial.Link, GoPeak, OneLittleWeb, Sure Oak, Outreach Monks. The per-link price is printed on the card or easy to work out.

Managed program. A monthly budget with a strategy attached, where link count is an outcome and not the product. uSERP sells this way and states its own per-link rate as a range.

Content-led and digital PR. You pay for content or a press campaign, and links are the by-product. Siege Media publishes starting figures for these and an effective cost per link, but no price list for links.

A full SEO and AI search retainer. Off-page work sits inside a wider program next to technical SEO and content, with AI visibility reported on top. You do not see a link price at all. LoudFace sells this way.

What each price band buys

Self-serve placements: about $60 to $520 per link

The bottom of the market prices by the host site's metrics. Rhino Rank charges $60 for a curated link on a site with 20 to 100 referring domains and $210 at 1000+. Respona runs from $100 for a DR 20+ publisher to $500 for DR 60+. FatJoe lists £60 to £380 per placement across six bands, from DR10+ up to DR60+. Above Apex sits at the top of this band, $400 to $520 per link, with DR 70+ costing $450.

What you get is the link. You choose which page it points at, and nobody promises what it does for you. This band suits a team with an in-house SEO lead who already knows which pages need links and only wants fulfilment.

Productized packages: about $500 to $6,300 a month

The dollar-priced plans run from about $500 to $6,300 a month, and saaslinkbuilder's euro plans from €1,499 to €5,999. This is where most B2B SaaS teams start, and the clearest pattern in the dataset lives here: the per-link price falls with volume inside a vendor and rises with the DR floor across them. Editorial.Link goes from $375 a link to $350 on 5 links to $300 on 20. GoPeak goes from $250 to $210 per link as you move from 10 to 30 links a month on monthly billing, from $190 to $160 on a 3-month commitment and from $160 to $140 on a 12-month one. OneLittleWeb goes from $428.43 to $370.33.

Raise the floor and the price climbs. Saasy Links charges $250 a link at DR 50+ on its Start plan, $300 at DR 60+ on Dominate and $350 at DR 70+ on Conquer. Packages also differ on terms, and that matters as much as price: Saasy Links and Outreach Monks are month-to-month, GoPeak sells month to month or, for less per link, on a 3-month or 12-month commitment, and Saasy Links and GoPeak both cover a lost link for a year (Saasy Links calls it link insurance, GoPeak a 12-month replacement).

Managed premium programs: $5,000 to $19,999 a month

Past about $5,000 a month you are buying volume plus judgment. uSERP sells link building "in the top two tiers only, from $5,000 a month" and says "We recommend around $10K for competitive SaaS and B2B categories." Its own math works out at "$600 to $900 per DR 60+ link", two to three times the $300 a link Saasy Links charges at DR 60+ on its Dominate package. LinkBuilder.io's Enterprise tier is $19,999 a month for 53+ links. Sure Oak Enterprise is $10,000 a month for 28 links.

In theory the premium pays for strategy and client approvals, plus better sites. Ask what is different about the links themselves, because a higher price with the same DR floor is a fee for management.

Content-led and digital PR: $8,000 to $15,000 a month

Siege Media publishes no link price list and no pricing page. Its digital PR page says services "start around $12-15,000 per month when both creating PR content and promoting it", and its content marketing minimum is $8,000 a month. Its link building page frames the cost the other way round: "That often means an effective cost per link under $250."

Here the links are earned by something worth linking to, a study or a story a journalist wants. This band also produces brand mentions on news and trade sites, which matters for AI search (more below).

Full SEO and AI search program, off-page included: from $5k a month

LoudFace engagements start from $5k a month, scoped on the intro call, and its pricing page sets the tiers by how many initiatives run at once. Off-page work is part of the SEO and AEO program: "Guest posts on high-authority publications, G2 and Capterra presence, Reddit and Quora strategy, community engagement." The program "ships weekly: entity-first content, technical fixes, structured data, link building, and the cross-platform GEO signals that keep your brand story consistent."

There is no LoudFace price per link, because links are not sold by the unit. The approach is a small number of placements on high-authority sites and pages that AI engines already pull, picked over volume. Proof from the off-page side comes from Delshad Legal, a Los Angeles employment law firm rather than a SaaS company. Ahrefs rated its domain at DR 4.9 on 1 June 2026, the week the work began, and at 25 in the first week of October. LoudFace kept pushing the firm's headline case as part of the program, and the October jump came as Ahrefs credited the coverage it earned, including a link from Deadline (Ahrefs Domain Rating 90). The full story is in the Delshad Legal case study.

What drives the price of one link

Four things move the price, in this order.

1. The authority floor. DR, DA or referring domains. Every vendor that prices by tier charges more for a higher floor.
2. Volume. Bigger packages lower the per-link price inside the same floor (Editorial.Link, GoPeak, OneLittleWeb all do this).
3. Traffic on the host site. Respona, FatJoe and GoPeak all add a traffic band next to the DR floor. A DR 60 site with no organic traffic is a weaker placement than its score suggests.
4. Format. A link inserted into an existing article (a niche edit or curated link) costs less than a new guest post, and a listicle placement costs more: Rhino Rank prices guest posts from $75 and listicle placements from $135.

Currency and term move the effective price too. GoPeak's 10-link package costs $2,500 a month billed monthly, $1,900 a month on a 3-month commitment and $1,600 a month on a 12-month one, and a quote in euros or pounds moves with the exchange rate.

Google's paid-link rule and the question to ask

Before you compare per-link prices, know what Google says about money and links. Its spam policies define link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", and list "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes" and "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links" as examples. Paid links are fine for advertising "as long as they are qualified with a" rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored value. Google's outbound link guidance is plain: "Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value."

So the question for any per-link or per-placement quote is simple. Does any of your money reach the publisher for a followed link? Most of the pricing pages I read do not say. The few that do describe their placements as editorial and not bought: Above Apex says "Not sponsored. Not guest posts you paid for. Earned through outreach, relationships, and relevance.", uSERP promises "no paid placements dressed up as editorial", and Saasy Links says each link is "placed by an editor, not bought from a marketplace." Get the answer in writing either way. A vendor whose answer is outreach, content and editorial judgment is selling labour. A vendor who cannot answer is asking you to carry the risk.

What AI search changes for a link budget

A link is a ranking signal for Google. AI engines work differently, and the data says a link budget aimed only at DR misses most of what they read.

In LoudFace's study of 192 AI answers to eight B2B SaaS agency buyer prompts, an equal number from each of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, "Ranked lists and roundups took 57.6% of the 2,728 citations. Press releases took 1.0%." That share is pooled across the three engines; the study does not split page types by engine. What the engines lift is a sentence with your name in it, on a page they already retrieve. As the study puts it: "A nofollow mention inside a roundup that 24 answers cite is worth more here than a followed link on a page nothing retrieves."

Ahrefs found the same direction from Google's side. In a May 2025 study of 75,000 brands, "Web mentions (0.664) correlate much more strongly than backlinks (0.218)" with brand visibility in AI Overviews, with Domain Rating at 0.326. The author is careful to add "correlation ≠ causation", and so should you be.

Each engine also reads a different part of the web. In the same 192-answer study ChatGPT pulled 21.5 distinct URLs per answer, Perplexity 14.2 and Google AI Overviews 6.9, and "linkedin.com carries 155 answer-citations, more than any other domain". LoudFace's tracking in its category (Peec AI, August 2026) found Google AI Overviews' most-cited domains included youtube.com, linkedin.com and reddit.com, while listicles took 81% of Perplexity's citations. A package of DR 60 guest posts touches none of those surfaces.

Our own site is the clearest case. LoudFace had a Domain Rating around 31 in April and 36 on 23 September, and on the non-branded prompts we track ChatGPT named us in 38.8% of its answers over 18 to 28 September 2026, Google AI Overviews in 14.3% and Perplexity in 11.2% (Peec AI, measured after a 17 September prompt cut, which lifts the reading). The case study puts that down to structure, freshness and specificity, not raw Domain Rating.

Link vendors have noticed. Editorial.Link's custom tier lists "Listicles for LLM boost", Rhino Rank sells listicle placements as "BEST FOR AI CITATIONS", Respona offers placements "like listicles that LLMs love", saaslinkbuilder's top plan adds "GEO/AEO list outreach", and GoPeak sells "Editorial mentions that grow your AI search visibility." None of these pricing pages shows citation data for the placements they sell. The nearest is a client write-up on saaslinkbuilder's service page: after 36 listicle placements, "the client now appears in roughly 30% of AI-generated answers for their main commercial queries", with no engine or measurement tool named. And as LoudFace's study found, no engine publishes a policy on whether paid placements change your citation odds. Google's rule does not change for a listicle: if money reaches the publisher for a followed link, it is a paid link.

My read for a Series A to C SaaS team: split the off-page budget in your head. One part earns Google authority for the pages that must rank. The other part buys or earns presence on the specific lists, threads and articles that ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews already cite for your buyer prompts. The two parts need different vendors and different success metrics. If you want the second part spelled out, read how to get into the best-of lists AI answers pull from.

What a B2B SaaS team should budget

Start from the job, then pick the band.

• You have an SEO lead and a page list. A productized package in the $1,250 to $3,500 a month range buys 5 to 10 links a month. Saasy Links, Editorial.Link, GoPeak and Above Apex all publish plans there.
• You compete in a crowded SaaS category and want someone else to own the plan. Managed programs start at $5,000 a month, and uSERP itself recommends around $10K for competitive SaaS.
• You have a story worth covering. Digital PR at around $12,000 to $15,000 a month earns links and press mentions instead of buying placements.
• You want Google and AI search handled as one program. LoudFace's full SEO and AI search retainer, from $5k a month, puts off-page work beside the content and technical work it supports (how that runs for SaaS). See what an AEO retainer buys and which AI search agencies publish their pricing.

In-house is the other option. In its guide to in-house versus outsourced link building, Saasy Links, a vendor with an interest in the answer, puts in-house link building at "$130K-$210K/year (salary + tools + management)" against "$45K-$96K" for agency retainers, building the in-house figure up from a $65,000 to $95,000 base salary. Treat both figures as one vendor's estimate.

Judge the spend by the pages it lifts and the pipeline those pages drive. Link count is the wrong scoreboard. Ten links pointing at a page that converts no one are a cost, whatever their DR.

How to judge a link building quote

Seven questions to put to any vendor before you sign, with what a strong answer and a red flag sound like.

1. What is the unit? Strong: a clear link count, a floor and a price per link. Red flag: a monthly fee with no deliverable count.
2. Which metric sets the floor, and whose tool? Strong: DR (Ahrefs) or DA (Moz), named, plus a traffic floor. Red flag: a DR floor with no traffic floor.
3. Does money reach the publisher for a followed link? Strong: a direct answer, and rel="sponsored" where it does. Red flag: no answer.
4. Which pages of ours will the links point at, and why? Strong: named pages tied to a ranking or revenue goal. Red flag: "your homepage and blog."
5. What happens if a link disappears? Strong: a replacement window in writing (Saasy Links and GoPeak both offer one year). Red flag: nothing in writing.
6. What is the term? Strong: month-to-month or a short initial term. Red flag: a long lock-in on a first engagement.
7. What will you report for AI search? Strong: named prompts and engines, and whether your brand was named, per engine. Red flag: "AI visibility" with no prompt, engine or tool behind it.

Ten of the vendors above are ranked in the best SaaS link building agencies, judged first on a named SaaS client with a number, then on a published price for link work and the method each states in its own words. LoudFace's pricing shows engagements from $5k a month, scoped on the intro call, with each tier turning up the number of initiatives, the cadence and the coordination.

Questions 3 and 7 sort vendors fastest. A vendor that answers both with specifics is worth its price in any band, and one that dodges either is selling you link count.