Most budget conversations happen at the wrong level of abstraction. A supplier quotes a monthly figure and a link count, and the buyer has no way to judge whether that is reasonable because they cannot see inside the number.
So here is the inside of the number, at three levels.
$1,500 a month
Realistic output: 4–5 verified placements, or one asset per quarter.
At this level roughly $600–$800 goes to publisher fees, $500 to prospecting, writing and outreach labour, and the remainder to verification, monitoring and overhead. Four to five placements is what closes.
Against a typical 70-domain gap, that is a fourteen-month plan — before accounting for competitors who are also acquiring. Which means the honest recommendation at this budget is usually not volume at all.
What we would actually suggest: spend two weeks claiming integration directories, partner listings and association memberships (usually 20–50 links, effectively free), then put the entire quarterly budget into one benchmark asset. That combination routinely produces more referring domains in year one than fifty-four bought placements would.
$3,000 a month
Realistic output: 7–9 verified placements.
The most common budget in SaaS and the one where the trade-offs are sharpest. A rough breakdown of where $3,000 goes on a properly-run programme:
| Line | Share | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher fees | ≈45% | The placements themselves |
| Prospecting & scoring | ≈18% | Including the ~two thirds rejected |
| Writing | ≈20% | Drafts a real editor will publish |
| Outreach | ≈9% | Individual pitching, follow-up |
| Verification & monitoring | ≈8% | Records, index checks, 12-month recrawl |
Note the second row. Nearly a fifth of the budget buys candidates that never ship. That is not waste — it is the product. A supplier who removes that line can deliver twelve placements instead of eight at the same price, and that is precisely how cheap link building gets built.
When you compare a $3,000 quote for 8 links against a $3,000 quote for 15, you are not comparing efficiency. You are comparing whether prospecting happened.
$6,000 a month
Realistic output: 16–18 verified placements, plus round-up placement running underneath.
The level at which a programme becomes a programme rather than a trickle. Publisher fees take a slightly larger share because volume allows access to better publications, and the fixed costs of prospecting infrastructure spread across more output.
This is also the point where a quarterly data study becomes affordable without cannibalising acquisition, which changes the shape of year two considerably.
The gap arithmetic
The number that actually matters is not links per month. It is months to close.
| Budget | Links/mo | 40-domain gap | 80-domain gap | 120-domain gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1,500 | 4–5 | 9 months | 17 months | 26 months |
| $3,000 | 7–9 | 5 months | 10 months | 15 months |
| $6,000 | 16–18 | 3 months | 5 months | 7 months |
| $11,000 | 34–36 | 2 months | 3 months | 4 months |
Two things fall out of this table.
The bottom-left corner is fine. A 40-domain gap at $1,500 a month closes inside a year. Small budget, small gap, workable.
The top-right corner is not. A 120-domain gap at $1,500 a month is a 26-month plan, during which competitors will have added domains of their own. That is not a slow programme; it is a programme that never finishes.
The test before you commit any budget
Run the gap subtraction first. Then divide by what your budget realistically buys.
If the answer is under 15 months, volume acquisition is a sensible use of the money. If it is over 20, buying placements is the wrong instrument regardless of how good the supplier is — and you should be building something citable instead.
This is a ten-minute calculation and it prevents the single most expensive mistake in this category.
What the money does not buy at any level
Three things worth being explicit about, because they get implied in proposals.
A ranking. Links are one input. If the page is thin, slow, or aimed at the wrong intent, acquisition is money spent holding a position.
Speed beyond what velocity allows. Doubling the budget does not halve the timeline indefinitely — acquisition faster than roughly 20 domains a month on a site with a modest history is its own risk.
Certainty. Editorial timelines are irregular. A month that delivers six against a target of eight, followed by one that delivers ten, is normal. A supplier who never misses is either sandbagging targets or sourcing from somewhere that never says no.
Getting more from the same budget
Four things that cost nothing and change the output materially.
- Approve drafts within three working days. The single biggest determinant of programme speed. A slow approver turns eight placements into five.
- Claim your free links first. Integration partners, associations, conferences, customers. Two weeks of email, 20–50 domains, zero budget.
- Fix internal linking before acquiring. Acquiring authority to a page that routes nothing onward wastes most of what you bought.
- Give sales thirty minutes. What objections actually kill deals changes which publications matter — and that changes the target list more than any budget increase.
Our own numbers
Published on the front page: $2,800 for 7 placements, $6,300 for 18, $11,400 for 36. Blended $317–$400 per link.
And the part that is less comfortable to publish: at the $2,800 tier, if your gap is over about 90 domains, we will tell you on the first call that this package will not close it and suggest you spend the first quarter on an asset instead. That conversation costs us the sale roughly one time in five, and it is the correct advice.