Link building agency for SaaS
Volume, budget and patience all have to match the stage you are actually at. Most SaaS companies buy the programme they will need in two years, run out of runway, and cancel it four months in with nothing to show.
Billed on live, indexed links · 12-month replacement · 30 days' notice
each with a different honest answer
of cancelled programmes were over-bought
median B2B SaaS sales cycle we plan against
of placements still live at twelve months
Four stages, four different answers
Pick your stage. Everything below rewrites — volume, budget, the gap you are realistically fighting, and the thing most companies get wrong at that point.
What to do
What sinks companies here
These are the bands we quote inside, not a promise. The gap on your specific page decides the real number, and we measure it free before anyone signs anything.
What actually changes between stages
Agencies talk about stage as though it were a pricing tier. It is not. It changes what you are buying, not just how much of it.
Shifts first
Bootstrapped, it is one long-tail page you can actually win. At Series A it is the category term. At Series B it is four pages at once, and the programme has to be split rather than pointed. Buying Series A volume for a long-tail page wastes most of it.
Shifts second
Early, expert commentary and round-up placement cost almost nothing and land quickly. Later, those stop moving the needle and the money has to go into assets — original data somebody else will cite — which no seed-stage budget can absorb.
Shifts last
The budget is the easy variable. The hard one is how many months your board will fund before it asks for revenue. A programme priced for eighteen months and funded for six is the single most common way this fails, and it fails quietly.
Three engagements, three stages
Seed
Eleven-person team, one term worth owning, and no budget for anything clever. We ran three placements a month against a single comparison page and refused to widen it, twice, when they asked. Position nine to position two over fourteen months.
$1,400/month · 42 placements · one target page
Series A
Their category page could not hold position four when it got there, so we stopped acquisition for six weeks and told them to rewrite it. The pause cost a month of billing and saved the programme — the same links landed differently afterwards.
$2,650/month · 118 placements · four target pages
Series B+
Referring domains already matched the two competitors above them. More placements would have moved nothing. The recommendation was a single annual benchmark, built once, and a much smaller retainer to place it. It has earned seventy-one domains on its own since.
Retainer cut by half · 1 asset · 71 domains and counting
Why stage decides everything
That is the whole reason over-buying is worse than under-buying. A programme cancelled at two thirds of a gap has bought almost nothing, and it cost more than the smaller one that would have finished.
Rates
Billed on live, indexed links. A month that underdelivers carries the shortfall forward rather than being invoiced in full.
Bootstrapped & seed
Short runway
$1,400/month
One page, three to four placements a month, and the discipline not to widen it before it is won.
Most engagements
Series A
Climb
$2,650/month
The category term plus the three pages that support it, at a volume that closes a real gap inside a year.
Series B and beyond
Altitude
$3,850/month
Contested head terms where the gap is ninety plus and competitors are still acquiring every month.
Blended unit cost runs $265 to $310 a placement. Credible B2B SaaS placements sit roughly between $150 and $500 across the market — below about $150 the delivery arithmetic stops closing, so the inventory is coming from somewhere else.
Before you commit runway
Ask these of us and of everyone else you are talking to.
Take the page you want to rank and the four URLs above it, and compare referring domains at page level rather than domain level. Under fifteen behind is a short-runway problem; fifteen to ninety is the Series A shape; ninety plus with active competitors is the top band. Use the selector above — it is the same arithmetic we run on a call.
Ours runs $1,400 to $3,850 a month for three to fifteen placements, a blended $265 to $310 each. Across the market credible B2B SaaS placements run $150 to $500. Interrogate the implied unit cost, not the monthly fee: a $1,200 retainer promising fifteen links is buying at $80, which is below what a real editorial placement costs to produce.
Because a programme that runs out of runway in month five has bought two thirds of a gap, which is worth almost nothing — rankings move at the end of the curve, not along it. Three placements a month sustained for eighteen months beats twelve a month cancelled in five, every time, and costs less than half as much.
Three horizons. Placements appear monthly. Search response — positions, impressions — between months three and eight. Commercial effect on a nine-month B2B sales cycle between months nine and eighteen. Conflating them is where most disappointment comes from.
About a fifth of enquiries. The two common reasons: the referring-domain gap is already closed and the constraint is the page itself, or the sustainable budget cannot close the gap inside twenty months. Both get the arithmetic in writing instead of a proposal.
Recrawled weekly and replaced free for twelve months. Attrition runs about four percent in the first year. Anything not indexed by day thirty is not billed, which puts the cost of a bad host on us rather than on you.
Blog
08 / Go
Tell us the page you need to move and the term it should own. We will pool the referring domains of the four URLs currently beating it, subtract yours, and send back the gap list — the real number, the publications inside it, and an honest estimate of how long closing it takes at your budget.
08:00–18:00 ET · Mon–Fri