Quarter
$1,500/month
For a gap under forty domains, or a first quarter you want to judge before committing further.
- 5 editorial placements a month
- Gap analysis and rejection log
- Monthly record, 12-month warranty
Best SaaS link building agency
We publish the standard before we publish your links
Eleven checks a domain has to survive before a dollar of your budget touches it. The list is on this page, the rejection log comes with every invoice, and you can hold us to both — placement by placement.
Written reply in one business day · billed on live links · 12-month replacement
0checks before we buy
0of candidates rejected
0still live at twelve months
1business day to a written reply
The standard
Eleven checks, published, in the order we run them
Most agencies describe quality. This is ours written down, so the argument is about the evidence rather than the adjective.
How each service applies it- 01
Verified organic traffic
On the placement page itself, not the domain. A site with 80,000 monthly visitors can publish you on a page that gets eleven.
- 02
Topical overlap
The publication already covers your category, measured rather than asserted. In B2B this is not a tiebreaker — it is most of the value.
- 03
Publishing history
Output that predates any outreach programme. A site that only started publishing when it started selling links is inventory, not a publication.
- 04
A real, findable author
Named, with a history elsewhere. Anonymous bylines that appear only on one site are the cheapest signal there is.
- 05
No shared footprint
Hosting ranges, templates and outbound patterns checked across the whole month's candidate set. Per-link vetting is structurally blind to this.
- 06
Sane outbound profile
Within normal bounds for the category. A page linking out to nine unrelated vendors is selling, not writing.
- 07
Load-bearing placement
In the body, in a sentence the article would be worse without. Delete the sentence — if nothing is lost, it was not contextual.
- 08
Anchor within distribution
Checked against your existing profile, not chosen for the keyword. Exact-match stays under 6% of the whole.
- 09
Attribute as agreed
Follow, sponsored or UGC, disclosed and recorded. We never quietly ship a no-follow against a follow brief.
- 10
Indexed within thirty days
Not indexed by day thirty is not billed. That moves host quality onto our side of the ledger, which is where it belongs.
- 11
Alive at twelve months
Weekly recrawl, replaced free if it dies. Attrition is predictable — a contract with no clause for it has moved a known cost onto you.
Why it is written down
A standard nobody can read is a preference, not a standard
Every rule below is one we have refused a placement over. Published in advance so the argument is about the evidence, not about who sounds more confident on the call.
Try the standard
Would you have bought this link?
Five real candidate profiles from a single month of prospecting, anonymised. Call each one, then see what we did and why. Most people buy at least two we rejected.
Candidate 1 of 5
0 correct
a devops newsletter, weekly
Why this exists
Every one of these came through prospecting in the same month. Four look buyable at a glance; the numbers say otherwise for three of them. This is the judgement you are actually paying an agency for — not the outreach, which is the easy part.
Your monthly record shows both sides: what shipped, and what we turned down with the reason code.
Get the same read on your own listSelected work
Three engagements, including the one we walked away from
-
62 → 8referring-domain gap
Vertical SaaS, Series A
Sixty-two domains between their category page and the four URLs above it. Closed to eight over eleven months at $2,750 a month, with the head term moving from position fourteen to three. Ninety-one placements shipped, one hundred and eighty-six candidates rejected.
$30,250 · 11 months · 91 placements
-
71domains from one asset
Developer tooling, seed
The budget could not close the gap by acquisition, so we said so and proposed the opposite: one annual benchmark, built and pitched once. It earned seventy-one referring domains over fourteen months and is still earning them with no further outreach spend.
$18,600 · one asset · still accruing
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0placements sold
Analytics platform, Series A
Their referring domains already matched the competitors'. The constraint was the page, not the links, so there was nothing for us to sell. We sent the analysis, they rewrote the page, and it moved four positions without a single new link.
Roughly a quarter of enquiries end here
Rates
Published, and billed on links that are live
A month that underdelivers carries the shortfall forward. It is never quietly invoiced.
Most engagements
Standard
$2,750/month
For a forty to ninety domain gap you want closed inside a year rather than three.
- 10 editorial placements a month
- Round-up and comparison placement
- Quarterly anchor-profile review
- Everything in Quarter
Category
$4,000/month
For a contested head term where the gap is ninety plus and competitors are still acquiring.
- 15 editorial placements a month
- One linkable asset a quarter
- Named strategist, fortnightly call
- Everything in Standard
Blended unit cost runs $267 to $300 a placement. Across the market, credible B2B SaaS placements sit roughly between $150 and $500 — below about $150 the delivery arithmetic stops closing, so the inventory is coming from somewhere else.
Questions
The ones that decide whether to hire anyone
What makes one SaaS link building agency better than another?
Whether it will show you what it rejected. Anyone can produce a list of links that shipped. The rejection log — with a reason code per refusal — is the only artefact that tells you a standard was applied rather than a quota filled. Ask for it before you ask about price.
How much should this cost?
Our rates are $1,500 to $4,000 a month for five to fifteen placements, a blended $267 to $300 per link. Credible B2B SaaS placements run roughly $150 to $500 across the market. Below about $150 nobody can prospect, pitch, write and get a real editor to publish — so the difference is inventory source, not efficiency.
How long before it shows in revenue?
Delivery is monthly. Search response — position bands, impressions, gap closure — lands between months three and eight. Commercial effect on a nine-month B2B cycle arrives somewhere between months nine and eighteen. Anyone promising revenue in month two is describing a different business.
Agency, freelancer or in-house?
In-house wins from roughly fifteen to twenty acquired links a month, sustained for a year — below that the fixed costs of a prospect index, sender reputation and editor relationships are cheaper shared. A freelancer with genuine relationships beats both at low volume, and cannot scale past their own inbox.
What happens when a link disappears?
Weekly recrawl, replaced free inside twelve months. About four percent need replacing in the first year. Attrition is predictable, which is why a contract with no clause covering it has quietly moved a known cost onto you.
Would you tell us not to hire you?
About a quarter of enquiries get exactly that. If your referring domains already match the competitors, the page is the constraint. If the gap needs more than twenty months at your budget, buying placements is the wrong instrument and we will say so before quoting.
From the blog
Written before it was asked for
-
How to hire a link building agency: the eleven-point brief
Most link building engagements fail at the brief. The eleven things to specify before you take a single sales call, and the three questions that filter out most of the market in one round.
Read
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What separates a good SaaS link building agency from an expensive one
Price is a poor signal in this market. Six things that genuinely differ between a good SaaS link building agency and an expensive one, and how to verify each before signing.
Read
-
Nine red flags in a link building proposal
Guaranteed DR, a link count with no gap analysis, a sample list nobody will let you verify. The proposal language that tells you where the inventory is really coming from.
Read
Free gap audit
Send us a brief
Tell us the category you are trying to win and the page you need to move. You will get a written reply from one of the founders within one business day — either a link-gap sketch and a proposed first quarter, or an honest note explaining why we are the wrong shop for this.
- No discovery-call gauntlet. The first reply is written, not booked.
- We will tell you if your budget is better spent on the page than on links to it.
- Roughly a quarter of enquiries get a polite no. It saves everyone a quarter.
Replies 08:00–18:00 ET, Monday to Friday.