How Much Do Backlinks Really Cost? A Price Read of the ChainEpic Catalog

A price index is only as honest as its denominator. This one uses the listings in ChainEpic's marketplace table, the same rows the homepage renders. It is not a sample of ten thousand orders, and it is not a survey of Finance or Health publishers across the open web. Those studies need an export this page does not have. Publishing a fake one would make the rest of the blog useless.

The summary chips show the median and the range. When the number of prices is even, the median is the average of the two middle prices. Mean is rounded only inside the chips. The tables keep the row-level prices. Guest-post prices here are the buyer price, and the checkout copy states that a 1,000-word article is included. That is not the same number a publisher takes home. Publisher payout is not in this table.

DR is Ahrefs' domain-level estimate of link strength. It is useful for sorting a list. It is a poor description of a single URL. Two rows in the same band can have traffic that differs by an order of magnitude, which you can see by reading the traffic column next to the price instead of averaging it away.

Use the band table to answer a budget question: what does this catalog charge once you refuse DR under 50? Then go back to the row. Turnaround, niche, and traffic still have to fit the page you are trying to support. A band median is not a quote.

Every loaded row that has both prices charges less for the niche edit than for the guest post. Checkout labels that gap as about 20% lower. Check the row anyway. A percentage on a button is a hint. The dollar gap is the decision, and it is different on a $65 listing than on a $349 one. The comparison write-up is in guest posts versus niche edits.

Cheaper is the wrong reason to pick an insertion if you needed a new URL that can rank on its own. You are buying a sentence inside someone else's article. If that article's traffic is old, the discount is not a bargain.

The bottom of the price range is where buyers talk themselves into a package of ten. Ten weak placements do not average into one strong one. Run the seven checks on a cheap row exactly as you would on an expensive one: traffic trend, country, outbound pattern, indexation, topic, rel attribute, and who controls the page after you pay.

If you want to turn a short list into a budget, the calculator further down the campaign plan multiplies a price by a count and then asks you to type the visits you are willing to assume. It will not invent those visits for you.