A TOURBR alternative, costed line by line: $380 of listings versus about eleven cents of lookups

Before any arithmetic, here is what the price list says. TOURBR's how-it-works page shows three boxes, and the add-backlink form repeats them as a selector.

Payment is a PayPal redirect after you press Place Order. The currency shows as a dollar sign and is never spelled out, so we treat it as USD without being able to quote the page on it. There is no subscription and no volume discount that we could find.

Two lines of the terms (last updated 8/20/2024) belong on any invoice review. The first: "No refunds are given for any reason." The second: "There is no expiration date on premium listings, however this could change at some point." Together they mean the fee should be treated as spent the moment you click.

Everything in this section is invented for the arithmetic; no real agency or client is described. Picture a small outreach shop that carries 12 client sites. For each client it wants one cheap no-expiry link to round out a profile, and for the eight clients with a money page it wants the featured version with an extra in-content link.

That is $19 per listing on average. It is a fair price for what the page describes, and the site is clear about what you get. The bill does not tell you three things, and each one has a price in staff time instead of dollars.

Staff time is easy to wave away, so put a number on it, again hypothetically. The form asks for a URL, anchor text, title, category, a gallery image and a story, and the terms ask for text of at least 100 words. Say that takes 15 minutes per listing once the copy is written: 20 listings is 5 hours. At an internal rate of $40 an hour that is $200 of labour on top of the $380, and it is the part of the bill nobody sees on PayPal.

Verification. After PayPal clears, the listing is published and that is the end of the service. There is no report that says the page is live, dofollow, indexed or counted anywhere. Someone has to open each of the 20 pages and look. Whether Google indexes a given listing page is something TOURBR does not claim and we did not check.

Reporting. The Manage page needs a login and we did not see it, so we make no claim about what is in it. The public site shows no export, no client-facing report and no alerting. If your client wants a spreadsheet of what was delivered, you build it by hand.

Vetting before you pay. The only authority figure on offer is the header badge, which shows DA 21 and DR 21 and sits next to the claim of a "high Domain Rating". The badge has no named source and no date. A neutral lookup is the only way to check it, and the next section does exactly that.

If you are going to pay $15 for a link from a domain, it is reasonable to look at the domain's own profile first. Here is what the top of tourbr.com's referring list looks like in our index (links, then donor DR in our metric).

Two readings follow. First, the domain's link count says little about its reach: 429 referring domains sounds wide, but only 193 of them pass a dofollow link, and the average donor DR is 30. We found no .gov or .edu referrers. Second, the long tail appears to be mostly customers. Names like Hi88, c168, LV88 and Property in Haridwar for Sale appear as anchors, and many more are naked /backlink/... addresses of individual listings, linked from places such as rohitab.com, sakura.ne.jp and onlc.fr. That pattern suggests buyers pointing a few links at their own listing page so it has something to pass on.

The oldest oddity is the 690 nofollow links from coffretderelayage.fr to story.php?title=toko-online, last seen 2025-09-15. That URL pattern looks older than the current WordPress listings, which suggests the domain ran a different bookmarking script earlier. The site does not say so; we are reading it from the URL.

You can open the same report yourself at the explorer page for tourbr.com. No sign-in is needed.

Now the checking side of the invoice. apibacklinks charges 1 credit, $0.0001, per lookup; list calls cost 2 credits; domain and overview are free. New accounts get $100 of free credit on first sign-in with Google, no card.

Treat the slack row as a deliberately generous estimate, not a measurement. Even with it, the checking costs about three hundredths of a percent of the $380 you spent on listings. The comparison is lopsided because the two bills pay for different things: TOURBR sells a placement, we sell data about placements.

That also means the API cannot do what the $380 did. We do not build links, sell links or index pages. If you want the link, you still need a place that publishes it.

Here is a procedure that fits in one afternoon. It uses one free call and three paid ones (two credits each).

1. Call action=domain&q=tourbr.com to get DR, backlink and referring-domain counts. Free.
2. Call action=backlinks with q set to the client's domain and a source-domain filter of tourbr.com. Two credits. The result shows whether the listing URL is in the crawl, the anchor, and the rel value.
3. Call action=anchors for the client. Check that the anchor you typed in the Backlink URL Text field is the one the crawl recorded.
4. Run action=intersect across the client and two competitors to see which referring domains the competitors share.

One honest caveat: our index is built from Common Crawl, refreshed roughly monthly, and a new link can take weeks to appear. If a listing published yesterday is missing from the output, that proves nothing yet. Check again after the next release. The full parameter list is in the API docs.

If your goal is a link, TOURBR does something we never will: it publishes one. You fill in a form, pay $15, and a page with your anchor is published once payment is received. There is no outreach and no negotiation, though the terms say submissions may be edited, moved or deleted after evaluation. For a small business site that needs a first handful of dofollow links with no stated expiry, that is a sensible, cheap move.

The free tier is a real option for testing. A nofollow listing that lasts 90 days costs nothing, so you can see how the page looks and what the site does with your text before you pay for Premium. And a $15 one-off fee is easier to approve than a monthly plan. No subscription means no cancellation to remember.

It also helps that the terms are written plainly: 100-word minimum on text, one-off fees, no refunds, and a stated risk that premium listings might not last forever.

Stay with TOURBR if you need placement and only placement, if you are happy to audit the result by hand, and if you can accept that its link graph is largely made of its own sister sites. Add apibacklinks when you want to see what a crawl thinks of the result, or when you need the same lookup across dozens of domains.

For the hypothetical month: $380.00 to buy 20 listings, and about $0.11 to look at the results with a generous allowance for reruns. The first number buys links. The second buys evidence about links. Nobody should swap one for the other.

If you run outreach for more than a few sites, the practical setup is to keep the placements wherever they are cheapest and run the audit through one endpoint. The link-building tools hub lists the neighbours we compare against, and the pages for UK Linkology and Dataseo.co.id cover two other sellers.