A SaaS Gains alternative, written as a postmortem

Nothing broke. That is the point of this page. A postmortem is useful before the outage, and the outage in link buying is quiet: you pay for placements, a report arrives, and nobody checks the crawl.

The scenario below is hypothetical. A small SaaS team, call it Team A, reads the SaaS Gains homepage on a Tuesday. The headline says SaaS Link Building Agency That Drives Rankings, Demos & MRR. The trust row says 80+ SaaS brands. The pricing page says $990. Team A books a call.

What follows is the report Team A should have written afterwards, using only public facts about the agency and numbers from our index. We have no inside view of any real client.

• Duration: one billing month.
• Severity: low. Month-to-month terms cap the exposure.
• Detection: manual, late, by reading the report.

Starter: $990 a month. Five backlinks. Included, per the pricing page: SaaS outreach campaigns, optimized anchor text, prior domain approval, manual link building, domain relevance matching, monthly reporting.

Do the division. $990 over 5 links is $198 each. Growth is $2,499 over 15 links, about $166.60 each. Per-link prices on their own are not published.

The process is seven steps, ending in Receive the live URL, placement details, and campaign report. Step four matters: Review and approve the recommended opportunities before outreach begins. The buyer approves each domain. So the buyer is the quality gate. The agency proposes. You decide.

That sets the whole postmortem. If approval is yours, the evidence you approve with is yours too.

Put a quarter on the table. Three months of Starter is $2,970 for 15 links. Three months of Growth is $7,497 for 45. Both are before any content you write yourself and before the time a strategist asks of you. The money is small next to a hire, and large next to a single bad batch of placements. That asymmetry is why a four-minute check per domain pays for itself.

We cannot see Team A's campaign. We can see the agency's own domain, which does what it sells to others. Dates are when our index first or last saw a link.

Thirteen months, 15 referring domains. About one new referring domain per month. Our crawl samples the web, so real totals may be higher.

Team A's problem, had it arisen, would not have been bad links. It would have been unmeasured links. The agency's own footprint shows why.

1. One page, ten links. All ten SaaS companies anchors come from a single jivochat.com page. One page counts as one editorial placement in the buyer's head, ten links in the backlink count.
2. One directory, zero dofollow. launchtory.com: 12 links, 9 pages, 0 dofollow. The directory tags links with ?ref=Launchtory. That helps explain why the naked saasgains.com anchor, 17 links, is only 18% dofollow.
3. One topic, one anchor. on-page SEO is 13 links, 20.3%, all dofollow. The second most linked URL is /blog/on-page-seo-for-saas/ with 19 backlinks. The most-linked inner page is a blog post, not a service page.

None of this is wrong. It is how a small profile looks. But a raw backlink count of 64 hides it. A table of referring domains does not.

Concentration is the number to watch. The top three referrers hold 51.6% of all links. Add wordtracker.com, 8 links with the anchor Saas Gains, and rswebsols.com, 7 links and no dofollow, and five domains hold 48 of 64, or 75%. The other ten referring domains contribute 16 links between them, most of them one link each. For a domain this size that is normal. For a buyer, it means a single publisher dropping a page moves the totals. Domain count is steadier than link count, so report on domains.

The cause, then: counts get reported, structure does not. Dashboards that log DR, traffic, anchor and rank per link, as the agency describes, answer a different question from what does the whole profile look like.

Before approving a domain at step four, pull three facts. Donor DR, referring-domain count, anchor spread. All three are in the API.

1. domain on the candidate publisher. Free, no key.
2. refdomains on the same domain. 2 credits, $0.0002.
3. bulk_dr on the whole shortlist. Up to 2,000 domains in one request.

Worked example, again hypothetical. The agency proposes ten publishers for Team A's first two months. Team A runs bulk_dr once and sorts. Two come back below DR 20. Team A asks for swaps. Cost of the check: a fraction of a cent.

After delivery, run backlinks on Team A's own domain with the source domain filter set to each publisher. If the placement is in the crawl, you see source URL, anchor, rel and last seen. If it is not, you cannot conclude it is missing: the crawl is monthly and a new link can take weeks. Wait one cycle, then ask.

One more habit costs nothing. Save the overview response for your own domain on the day the campaign starts: counts, DR, top five referring domains and anchors. Save it again after each monthly refresh. You get your own history, since the API keeps none, and you can show the agency exactly which month a link appeared.

Full API reference: api-docs.

Plainly: most of the time, if you want links built, not measured.

• It does the work. apibacklinks builds, sells and indexes nothing. SaaS Gains runs outreach, writes the content and negotiates placement. That is the job you are paying for.
• Scope. The agency focuses on SaaS, fintech, HR tech, DevOps and B2B marketing technology, per its FAQ. We have no category scoring at all.
• Reporting you can hand to a boss. It describes a live dashboard with DR, traffic, anchor text and keyword rank movement, plus a monthly review. We have no dashboards, no alerts, no new-and-lost report and no rank tracking.
• A shortfall rule. If the agreed number of approved links is not delivered in a month, the shortfall carries over at no extra cost, per its FAQ.
• Flexibility. Month to month. You can pause or scale volume, with no long-term contract stated.
• White label. It offers resold links under your brand. We do not.

Who should stay: a team with no outreach staff, a budget of $990 or more per month, and no wish to read a JSON response. The agency's own comparison says an in-house hire costs $80,000 to $120,000 a year before a link is placed; that figure is its claim, not ours. For that team the arithmetic favours the agency.

Who should add us: anyone approving placements who wants a number next to each domain.

The corrective action is small. Keep the agency. Add an audit layer.

Planning is the other half. intersect returns referring domains shared by two to ten targets. Feed it three competitors. The domains that link to all three are your outreach list, and you can hand that list to an agency instead of waiting for them to find it. The agency lists Competitor Link Intelligence as a step. Doing it yourself first lets you judge theirs.

If you are weighing several agencies, our hub on link building tools lists the neighbours, and the Shop-ik page is another comparison in the same series.

1. Approval power is audit duty. If you approve each placement, you own the evidence.
2. Count domains, not links. Ten links from one page is one placement. 64 backlinks here come from 15 domains.
3. Read the rel. The largest referrer in the profile is nofollow. That can be fine. Know it.
4. Trust claims at their own weight. The homepage carries a self-reported brand count and a review score, and no review platform is linked. We could not verify either, so we leave the score out. We also skip the larger counters: the homepage gives two different DR figures and it is unclear how the counters map to labels.
5. Give the crawl a cycle. our web index is not real-time. A missing link after three days means nothing.
6. Keep the cost of checking near zero. A full profile read, such as refdomains, backlinks, anchors and toppages at 2 credits each, costs eight credits. About $0.0008.

Our DR is not Ahrefs DR and not Moz DA. Use it to rank candidates against each other, not to match another tool's number. No link, from any vendor, promises a ranking.