A LinkExchange alternative, found by reading the bill

Most bill autopsies start with the total. This one starts with a line that is not on any invoice: the single biggest source of links pointing at LinkExchange is the firm that owns it. Open nandbox.com and you find 'Link Building Tool' in the menu and again in the footer, each pointing at linkexchange.ai. Two such links on each of 2,187 crawled pages comes to roughly the 4,315 links in our index.

We begin there because it sets the tone for the exercise. Everything in a link marketplace is a price attached to a placement, and a placement has a donor, an anchor and a date. A sitewide house link costs its owner almost nothing, which makes it a useful contrast with the placements a buyer pays for. So the plan is simple. We build a hypothetical month of spending on LinkExchange, put a figure on every line the company publishes, mark every line it does not, and then price the work of checking the purchases.

One caution for the arithmetic. The pricing page prints a bare '$' with no currency code, and the operator is in Canada. We treat every figure as dollars of unstated currency.

Start with the cheapest line. The free plugin is described as 'Free forever', ships with '500 one-time credits', allows one active campaign with up to five target URLs, and includes the internal link builder. Hosting earns credits without a cap on earnings: 'Unlimited hosting earnings' is the printed phrase.

The mechanism is a swap. You let relevant links sit on your own posts, you approve each one by hand (the plugin page says nothing goes live without your approval), and the credits you earn are spent on links for your own pages. The Terms add two details that matter for the bill. Credits 'have no cash or monetary value', so hosting never produces money. And credits earned by hosting are held until the placement is verified, and can be reversed if the link is later removed, changed or blocked from indexing.

Subscription cost this month: $0. What the 500 starter credits buy is not published, so the free line of the bill has a total and no quantity.

The Pro plan lifts the limits: unlimited active campaigns, up to 50 target URLs per campaign, advanced targeting, priority and smarter matching, automation and analytics. The list price printed is $348 a year. A discounted first-year price was on the page on the check date, but promotions expire, so we price the list figure.

The arithmetic: $348 divided by 12 is $29.00 a month. The Terms mention a monthly plan as well, and its price is not on the pricing page. They also say plans renew automatically until cancelled and that fees are non-refundable, including on mid-term cancellation. A buyer who wants to try Pro for one month should check that clause first.

The pricing page also carries a note under Pro: 'Marketplace placement credits are earned or purchased separately.' In other words, the $29 pays for the machinery and none of the links.

The second product is the managed one. The services page calls it 'Authored articles on real publications': you pick publishers (filtered by DR, traffic, niche and price), the team writes, an editorial review follows, and the article stays 'subject to the publisher's editorial policies'. The pricing page says 'from $59 /article'. The catalogue and the per-publisher prices sit behind a login, so the only published figure is the floor.

Take a hypothetical owner of a WordPress affiliate blog who wants four articles this month, all at the floor price:

• 4 articles x $59 = $236, no subscription;
• add Pro at $29 a month = $265;
• $265 / 4 = $66.25 per placement, all in.

Both totals are minimums. A publisher with real traffic will not sit at the starting price, and nothing published says how far the range runs. The owner in this story is invented for the arithmetic; no real customer is described.

The homepage compares 'Buying elsewhere $361' with 'Buy with credits from $25' and 'You pay $0 when you host links'. The $25 is the only figure for buying a link with credits. No credit pack, no credits-per-dollar rate and no per-link credit cost is published, so the credit line has to be an estimate. We assume six credit-bought links at the printed floor of $25.

• 6 links x $25 = $150;
• with Pro at $29 = $179;
• $179 / 6 = about $29.83 per link.

Here is the month in one table.

The cheapest placement is the one you earn by hosting, and it is also the one whose price is paid in a link on your own site rather than in dollars.

The marketplace verifies links itself. The Terms say the service periodically fetches pages carrying an agreed link to confirm it is present, live and as agreed. That is a check from the seller's side. A buyer may also want a second opinion from a source that does not sell the link, and that is where our data fits. It cannot see everything, since it comes from our own web data and is refreshed roughly monthly, not in real time. A link placed last week may not show for weeks.

Here is a month of audit for the four-article scenario:

1. Shortlist candidate publisher domains with the free domain action: 0 credits, however many you check.
2. For each of the four chosen domains, read the free overview (0 credits), then pull refdomains (2 credits) and backlinks filtered by source domain (2 credits): 4 x 4 = 16 credits.
3. After publication, re-run the filtered backlinks call per target once the next crawl lands: 4 x 2 = 8 credits.

Total: 0 + 16 + 8 = 24 credits. At $0.0001 a credit that is $0.0024. Round it up to 100 list calls and you have used 200 credits, or $0.02. The $100 starter credit on first Google sign-in covers 1,000,000 credits. The API reference lists the filters used above.

A bill states a price. It does not state what the link looks like once it exists, and the donor side of a placement is where an index earns its keep. Look at the three burst domains in LinkExchange's own profile. top10placestovisitintheworld.com shows 111 links on 111 pages, one link per page, all from a single crawl date in July 2026, with the one-word anchor 'service'. wprole.com shows 62 on 62 with 'process', and webdevelopmentor.com 27 on 27 with 'benefits'.

That shape, a single in-text word linked once per page, is what an insertion into existing articles tends to look like. We did not verify that those sites use the plugin, so treat it as a pattern and not as a finding. The useful part for a buyer is the method: pull the donor's referring domains, check its DR, and read the anchors it already carries. A donor whose own profile is thin or bursty tells you what a placement on it is likely to be worth.

You can run the same read for free on any domain in the explorer. Our DR is our own score, comparable in spirit to other tools but not equal to them. Sibling pages such as the Cepmax alternative cover other vendors in the same way, and the link building tools hub collects the rest.

Be plain about this: we sell no links, no articles and no workflow, so on the jobs below LinkExchange is simply the better choice.

• You run WordPress and want swaps without a spreadsheet. The plugin indexes your posts, proposes matches and holds credits. Our API returns JSON about other people's sites and does nothing inside yours.
• You want the article written. Guest posting from $59 includes professional writing and editorial approval. We provide data only.
• You want the placement verified by the seller. The Terms describe periodic fetches and credit reversal if a link is removed. We have no monitoring, no alerts and no new-or-lost-links report.
• You want internal linking help. It is included even on the free plan.

If your month looks like the first row of the table, stay. Use us only for the second opinion: a few free calls before you accept a placement on your site.