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

Actually is true, my friend. In Brazil for a site with 20k traffic i pay 400 reais which is like 70 dollar, permanent, direct with the owner by whatsapp.

The same site if you write in english to the contact form they answer 250 dollar. Is the same site! Nobody believe me when i say this but is normal here, the price is for who is asking (o preço é para quem pergunta).

every seller everywhere prices on the accent. this isn't a brazil thing

Six weeks in. 34 invoices from 11 people, everything converted to USD at the rate on the day so the columns are comparable.

Type	n	Median	Range	Most common source
Guest post	14	$195	$40 – $850	direct
Link insert	9	$290	$120 – $610	broker
Homepage / sitewide	4	$150/mo	$55 – $290/mo	direct
Rented, in-content	3	$90/mo	$60 – $180/mo	broker
PBN	4	$30	$18 – $55	marketplace

Two things I did not expect. Link inserts are consistently more expensive than guest posts at the same traffic level, which is the opposite of what I assumed going in — the explanation offered in PMs is that an insert on an existing ranking page is the thing the seller knows is worth something and the guest post is inventory they create on demand.

And the range inside guest posts is 21x. That is not a market with a price, it's a market with a negotiation.

Median on n=4 isn't a median, it's the second-cheapest thing anyone happened to post. Fine for guest posts at 14, dishonest for the PBN row.

Drop any row under 8 or mark it clearly. Otherwise someone quotes "$150/mo homepage links" back at you in six months as if it means something.

Fair. Rows under 8 marked thin from the next update.

Thanks for doing this, genuinely. I've stopped buying anything under $100 on the strength of it.

Wrong lesson, but a harmless one. Price isn't the filter. Some of the cheapest links I've ever bought were from small sites run by people who had no idea what the market rate was, and those are the best links there are.

The filter is whether a human being reads the site.

guest post, 31k traffic, $290, direct, permanent. did what people said and emailed the owner instead of the marketplace, half price!

Congratulations. You emailed someone.

Live check on mine: the £220 insert is gone, confirmed dead. The other four from Q1 are all still up.

So 4 of 5 at four months, which I'd have guessed was optimistic.

There's a separate thread that's just started on homepage links specifically and the numbers in it are better than our homepage row, because everyone posting is only posting that one type.

Might be worth pointing at it rather than duplicating the column.

Agreed, I'll drop the homepage row entirely at the next update and defer to that one. No point maintaining a worse version of a table that already exists.

Four months since the last table. Is this dead or is nobody buying?

Not dead, waiting. The live/dead column was the whole point of the delay and it's finally worth publishing.

61 invoices, 14 contributors, everything bought January through May so each link has had at least ten weeks.

Type	n	Median	Still live
Guest post	24	$210	22 of 24
Link insert	17	$300	11 of 17
Rented, in-content	6	$95/mo	5 of 6
PBN	7 (thin)	$30	4 of 7

Inserts cost more and die more. Six of seventeen gone inside six months, and in four of those the page itself is still ranking — the link was removed, the page wasn't. Two people report the same broker re-selling a slot they'd already sold.

If you price that in, the median insert isn't $300, it's $300 for a two-in-three chance of something that lasts a year. Guest posts at $210 with a 92% survival rate are the better buy at every point on this table and I did not believe that in February.

Median across everything one-off, all types: $220. That's the number to quote back at anyone who tells you the market is $500.

the broker reselling the same slot is the only genuinely new thing in this thread