What a link ACTUALLY costs in 2025 — post your last invoice, not your last quote

Price threads on this board die because they mix two different numbers: what a seller asked, and what somebody paid. Those differ by a factor of three in my own records and I want to see whether that holds for anyone else.

Post only money that has left your account, in 2025. Five fields:

1. Type — guest post, link insert, homepage, sitewide, rented, PBN, or other
2. Site's real monthly organic traffic, your best estimate and say which tool
3. Price paid, in your currency
4. Permanent or renewal, and if renewal, the period
5. Who you bought from — site owner direct, broker, agency, marketplace. No names needed.

I'll maintain a table in this post and re-post it whenever there's enough new data to change a row. I'm starting with my own last six invoices so nobody has to go first.

Type	Traffic	Paid	Term	Source
Guest post	14k	€260	permanent	direct
Guest post	3k	€95	permanent	direct
Link insert	41k	€410	permanent	broker
Link insert	9k	€180	permanent	direct
Homepage	6k	€55/mo	monthly	direct
PBN	n/a	€25	permanent	marketplace

The spread inside "link insert" there is the interesting part and I don't have enough data to say whether the broker markup or the traffic explains it.

€25 pbn link. from a marketplace. you know what that is

I do. It's in the table because it's a real price somebody paid, which is what I asked for. Judgement on the value goes in a different column to the number.

I'll add from the other side of the desk, because you're going to get a distorted picture otherwise.

Guest post, 14k traffic, €260 — that's roughly what the site owner is charging, and roughly what I'd expect. If it had come through an agency you'd have paid €700 to €900 for the same placement on the same site.

Depends what you're running, but the practical version of this thread is: the price of a link is mostly the price of the number of people between you and the person who can publish it. Everything else is second order. Traffic matters, DR barely matters any more except as a filter sellers use to price, and niche matters enormously — the same site will quote €200 for a recipe post and €1,400 if you say the word "casino" in the first email.

Sorry, complete beginner question — when you say direct, how are people finding the site owner? Every site I've tried has either no contact page or a form that goes nowhere, which is presumably why the brokers exist.

Guest post, 2k traffic, $120, permanent, from a marketplace. Which after reading your post I suspect I overpaid on.

Prices are about four times what they were in 2016 and the links are worse, which is a sentence I've now typed on three different boards.

Four invoices from January and February, all real money out:

• Link insert, 22k traffic, $340, permanent, direct
• Guest post, 60k traffic, $850, permanent, direct — this one was worth it
• Rented link, homepage of a 30k site, $180/mo, still running
• Guest post, 1k traffic, $75, permanent, broker

The $75 one is the one I want people to look at. It's cheap enough that you stop thinking about whether it's worth anything, which is precisely the price point sellers have optimised into existence. I've bought maybe forty of those over the years and I could not point at one and tell you it did something.

$40 guest posts from a vendor on telegram, bought 15, DR30-45 sites!! Cheapest I've seen anywhere

Traffic on those sites? DR is what you buy when the traffic number would embarrass you.

checked five of them. two have like 400 a month and three are basically zero. ok I see it

Fifteen links to nowhere. Congratulations, you own a hedge maze.

IME the field you're missing is time-to-live. I've got two invoices at similar prices where one link is still up after four years and the other vanished in eleven weeks, and the price told me nothing about which was which.

Link insert, 18k traffic, £220, sold as permanent, gone by month five. Same broker quoted me the same site again in December.

Add a column for whether it's still live and re-check it in six months. That's the number that turns a price into a cost.

Adding it. I'll ask everyone who has posted a 2025 invoice to come back in the autumn and say live or dead, and I'll carry that as a separate column rather than trying to price it in.

It does mean the table is worthless until roughly September, which I should have thought about before starting this in February.

Guest post on ukrainian site, 8k traffic, 60 dollar, permanent, direct to owner.

Anyway is not same market. In english you pay 300 for this.

60 dollars? that's my whole test budget in one link over here

This is the single biggest variable in the thread and it's going to get flattened by the table.

Same quality of site, same traffic: English-language general niche is 3 to 5x what the equivalent costs in CEE, and maybe 8x what it costs in parts of LATAM and South Asia. If your money site is English that gap isn't free money — a link from a Ukrainian recipe blog to a US insurance page is doing something different to what the price difference implies. But if you're building in those markets, half the numbers in this thread are irrelevant to you.