Buying Links One at a Time Is the Right Idea. Their Whole Shop Is $38.50.
Written by Submitator, which sells the same directories in plans rather than by the link, so read it adversarially. Every price is taken from the shop's own cards, every Domain Rating was read fresh rather than copied, and the footnote says exactly what was checked and when.
backlinks.shop sells backlinks individually. You open the shop, you see the site, its Domain Rating, its traffic and its price, you tick the ones you want and you pay for those. Prices run from $0.50 to $4.00 a link. Their own line for it is the best summary anyone has written of what is wrong with this market: "$0.50–$4 per link. Buy 3 or 300. You decide, every time."
That instinct is correct, and we will spend a section of this page saying so properly. The problem is what happens when you do the addition. There are 25 sites in the shop. Add every single one of them to the cart, buy the entire inventory, and the total is $38.50. Submitator is $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100.
So the most you can possibly spend there costs $9.50 more than our smallest plan and leaves you five links short of it. Per link they average $1.54. We are $0.97 at the entry tier and $0.79 at the top.
Their shop is 25 links and $38.50 if you buy all of it. Ours is 30 directories for $29 or 100 for $79, picked the same way, from a catalog of more than 120 with the Domain Rating on every card and nofollow marked where it applies. Thirteen of the 21 sites they name are already in that catalog.
backlinks.shop vs Submitator
| Feature | backlinks.shop | Submitator |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0.50, one link | $29, 30 directories |
| Buy the whole inventory | $38.50, 25 links | $79, 100 directories |
| Average per link | $1.54 | $0.79 at the top plan |
| Sites available | 25 | 120+ |
| You choose them | Yes | Yes |
| Domain Rating shown | Yes, 18 of 20 differ from a live read | Yes, checked |
| Own sites in the list | 4 of 25, no domain printed | None |
| Badge directories | Not in the shop | Installed and kept live |
| Taking orders | Waitlist, every other page 404s | Open |
| Rejections | Not stated | Credited back as +1 directory |
Per backlinks.shop, read on 13 September 2026, and per submitator.com/pricing and /terms. Their per-link prices, the 25 sites in the shop, the Domain Ratings and traffic figures on the cards, the "own network · Local Authority" labels and every quoted sentence are taken from their own homepage, which on that date was the only page on the domain that resolved: /shop, /network, /orders, /checkout, /pricing, /about, /terms, /privacy and /sitemap.xml each returned 404. The $38.50 is arithmetic on the 25 card prices as displayed, taking the discounted figure where a card shows one struck through; at the pre-discount prices the same basket is $42.50. The $1.54 is 38.50 divided by 25, and our own per-directory figures are each plan price divided by its directory count: 29/30 = $0.97, 49/60 = $0.82, 79/100 = $0.79. The overlap of 13 sites is a name match between their 21 named cards and our own catalog in lib/directories.ts, and $21.75 is the sum of their prices for those 13. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' figure via submitator.com/domain-rating-checker, read for all 21 named domains on 13 September 2026: two matched the card exactly (Crunchbase 91, Product Hunt 91), eighteen did not, twelve of those read higher than the card and six lower, and one site (aitoolsdir.io) returned no reading and is excluded from those counts. Domain Rating moves between crawls, so a gap of a point or two is ordinary drift and nothing is inferred from one; the five cited gaps are ten points or more. The four own-network entries publish no domain, so their DR numbers could not be read at all, and no claim is made here about what those four sites are. The Y Combinator point is from ycombinator.com/launches, where all 20 launches in the live feed carry a YC batch and link to YC's internal Bookface platform, and /launches/new redirected a logged-out request to the YC homepage. Nothing was bought from backlinks.shop, no order was placed and no link was delivered, so their placement quality, turnaround and refund behaviour are outside what we can report. They state a first live link in 48 hours; Submitator's terms state an aim of 2 to 3 days and a committed ETA of 30 days from purchase with a proportional refund for directories undelivered within it, so this page makes no speed comparison in either direction. Our plans are $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, one-time, chosen by you in the dashboard with each Domain Rating shown and nofollow marked where it applies, badges installed and kept live, rejections credited back as +1 directory and a 30-day refund policy on the conditions in our terms.
Add the entire shop to the cart
Most comparison pages have to argue about what a competitor's package is worth. This one does not, because backlinks.shop prices every item separately and shows you the whole inventory on one screen. So we added it up.
Twenty-five sites. The cheapest three are $0.50. The dearest is a Y Combinator Launch listing at $4.00. Product Hunt is $3.50, Crunchbase $3.00, Capterra and AlternativeTo $2.50. Everything, all of it, every link they have to sell: $38.50.
That is not a cherry-picked basket. That is the shop. And it sits $9.50 above our cheapest plan while delivering five fewer links than it. Spend their maximum and you have 25. Spend $29 with us and you have 30, chosen from more than 120. Spend $79 and you have 100, which is four times their entire inventory for roughly twice their entire inventory's price.
There is one honest exception, and it matters: if you want exactly one link and nothing else, they are cheaper, because $0.50 is less than $29 and we do not sell singles. Buy it from them. The moment you want ten, the arithmetic has already turned.
Thirteen of their twenty-one are already in your plan
Their shop names 21 sites and hides the domain on 4 more. We checked those 21 against our own catalog by name. Thirteen are in it: SourceForge, G2, Capterra, Indie Hackers, Toolify, There's An AI For That, Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, Futurepedia, SaaSHub, BetaList, DevHunt and Uneed.
Buying only those thirteen from them comes to $21.75. Our $29 covers the same thirteen and another seventeen you choose yourself. That is the shape of the whole comparison: this is not two different products, it is the same shelf priced two different ways, and one of the two ways runs out at 25.
The Domain Rating on the card is the product
Everything backlinks.shop sells rests on one promise, and they make it three separate times on the homepage: "See the DR, traffic, and price on every link before you spend a cent" and "DR and quality shown up front. You cherrypick every site and skip the junk." The number on the card is not decoration. It is the thing you are buying the shop for.
So we read all 21 named domains through our own Ahrefs-backed checker in a single sitting. Two matched. Crunchbase at 91 and Product Hunt at 91. Eighteen did not, and five of those were out by ten points or more.
| Site | On the card | Ahrefs, 13 Sep | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tinylaunch | DR 41 | DR 73 | +32 |
| StartupBase | DR 48 | DR 73 | +25 |
| Uneed | DR 54 | DR 75 | +21 |
| BetaList | DR 66 | DR 76 | +10 |
| Landing Folio | DR 55 | DR 65 | +10 |
| SaaSHub | DR 71 | DR 80 | +9 |
| Slant | DR 78 | DR 69 | -9 |
| AlternativeTo | DR 87 | DR 80 | -7 |
Read the direction of those gaps, because it is the opposite of what you would expect. Most of them run downward on the card. Tinylaunch is priced at $0.50 and shown at DR 41 when it reads 73. StartupBase is $0.50 at DR 48 and reads 73. Uneed is $0.75 at DR 54 and reads 75.
Nobody is being flattered here. The numbers are simply old, and stale numbers do a specific kind of damage to a shop built on cherrypicking: they send you past the cheapest strong links on the shelf. A founder using that shop exactly as instructed skips a DR 73 site for fifty cents because the card says 41, and pays $2.50 for AlternativeTo on a card that says 87 when the live reading is 80.
We have the same obligation and we take it seriously, because our catalog prints a Domain Rating on every card too. The difference is that ours is wired to a checker anybody can run against any domain, including ours, right here, and where a directory passes no link equity we print that on the card instead of leaving you to find out.
Four of the twenty-five are theirs
Twenty-one cards in the shop print the domain you are buying a link from: sourceforge.net, g2.com, producthunt.com and so on, each with its favicon fetched live. Four do not. Where the domain goes, those four read "own network · Local Authority": Vancouver Startups at DR 38, Toronto Tech Index at 41, Austin SaaS Review at 43, Oslo Founders Guide at 36.
A directory owner selling listings on their own directory is not a scandal. We submit customers to directories we write guides about and we say so on every one of those guides. The difficulty is narrower and it is entirely a difficulty of checking: these are the only four cards in a shop built on verifiable numbers where the number cannot be verified, because there is no domain to look up.
They are also, per DR point, the most expensive things on the shelf. The four are listed at $2.00 and sold at $1.00, which is above DevHunt at DR 58 and Uneed at DR 54, both $0.75. You are paying a premium over better third-party sites for the four whose Domain Rating you cannot confirm.
The $4.00 door that opens from inside
The single most expensive line in the shop is "Y Combinator — Launch" at $4.00, DR 90. Launch YC is the page where YC portfolio companies announce themselves, and the feed says so plainly: all twenty of the most recent launches carry a YC batch, each with a link back to Bookface, which is YC's internal platform for its own founders. Ask for the posting page while logged out and you are redirected to the YC homepage.
It is not a form somebody can fill in on your behalf for four dollars. It is a batch you get into by being funded. Every service in this market has to draw a line between directories it can submit to and places it cannot, and ours is drawn in the catalog itself: the directories you tick are directories that accept submissions, and when one rejects you it comes back as a credit for another.
The shop is not open yet
This is the part that decides whether anything above is urgent. On 13 September 2026 the homepage is the only page on the domain that resolves. The shop, the network, the checkout, the order tracker, the pricing page, the terms and the privacy policy all return 404. The headline number is "5,000+ links at launch", future tense, against the 25 the demo shop currently holds.
The wall of love is the tell, and to their credit they did not fake it. The quotes are real people saying they joined a list: "I signed up, this looks like something I'd use!", "registered in the waitlist!", "I am on waiting list." One of them ends "All the best for your launch!"
There is a smaller irony worth exactly one sentence: the shop that sells Domain Rating by the point currently reads DR 0 on its own domain. That is ordinary for a new site and it is not an accusation. It is simply what it means to be comparing a plan you can buy today against a shop that opens later.
The free network is an exchange
Their second product sits beside the shop: "or trade them free in the verified network". Free is a real price and reciprocal linking between genuinely related sites is not the thing anybody gets penalised for. Worth knowing what category it lives in, though. Google's spam policies name "Excessive link exchanges (‘Link to me and I'll link to you’) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking", and the operative word there is excessive.
A directory listing is structurally a different thing. The directory publishes you because it wants the entry, and it gets nothing from you in return, which is why there is no reciprocity to be excessive about. We argue that at length on our VerifiedDR page, which is about a company selling the same mechanism at $299.
What they get right
A comparison page that only found faults would be worth nothing, and this one has a genuine idea to credit. Per-link pricing is the correct instinct, and almost nobody in this market has the nerve to offer it. Their own framing of the problem is sharper than most of the criticism we have written about competitors: "Others charge $199 up front, then hand you a spreadsheet that says ‘done.’ We show the proof URL for every link." That is a fair description of a real thing this industry does.
Showing Domain Rating and traffic on the card before any money moves is right. Letting somebody spend fifty cents to find out whether they trust you is right. Filtering by country and by niche so a French SaaS is not filed into an American men's health directory is right, and it is more thought than most done-for-you packages have ever given the question. Four steps and no sales call is right.
We disagree with them on arithmetic, on how fresh the numbers are and on how much shelf there is behind the idea. We do not disagree with the idea.
Which one should you buy?
If you want one link, or three, and you want to pay for exactly those, wait for their shop to open and buy them. Nothing here sells singles and we are not going to pretend fifty cents is expensive.
If you want thirty, sixty or a hundred, the comparison stops being close. Their entire inventory is $38.50 and 25 links. Our $29 is 30 directories, our $79 is 100, you pick every one of them from a catalog of more than 120, the Domain Rating on the card was checked rather than inherited, badges are installed through one component and kept live, and a rejection comes back as another directory instead of a shrug.
Their entire shop: $38.50 for 25 links. Our $29: 30 directories you pick.
One payment, every directory named with its Domain Rating on the card and nofollow marked where it applies, badges installed through one component and kept live, and a rejected submission credited back as another directory of your choice.
Real backlinks. Real DR. Real proof.
backlinks.shop alternative: the short answer
Buy singles from them if singles are what you want. Past about ten links their whole shop costs more than our smallest plan and contains fewer sites than it, thirteen of which you were getting from us anyway.
$38.50 for all 25. Or $29 for 30 you pick.
backlinks.shop sells links one at a time from $0.50 to $4.00, which is the right idea. There are 25 sites in the shop, 13 of them already in our catalog, and buying every one costs $38.50. Eighteen of the 20 Domain Ratings we could read disagreed with the card, five by ten points or more. Our $29 is 30 directories you choose from more than 120. All the submission tools compared.
FAQ
How much does backlinks.shop cost compared to Submitator?
They price per link, from $0.50 to $4.00. There are 25 sites in the shop, and adding every one of them to the cart comes to $38.50, which works out at $1.54 a link. Submitator is $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, which is $0.97, $0.82 and $0.79 each. So their whole shop costs $9.50 more than our entry plan and hands you five fewer links.
Can you buy a single backlink from backlinks.shop?
That is the whole idea, and it is a good one. Tick one site, pay for one site. The cheapest are Tinylaunch, StartupBase and AI Tools Directory at $0.50; the dearest is a Y Combinator Launch listing at $4.00. Nothing on our side sells one directory on its own, so if you genuinely want exactly one link and nothing else, buy it from them.
Do Submitator and backlinks.shop cover the same directories?
They overlap heavily. Their shop names 21 sites, and 13 of those are already in our catalog: SourceForge, G2, Capterra, Indie Hackers, Toolify, There's An AI For That, Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, Futurepedia, SaaSHub, BetaList, DevHunt and Uneed. Buying only those 13 from them costs $21.75. Our $29 plan covers all 13 and another 17 you pick yourself from a catalog of more than 120.
Are the Domain Ratings on backlinks.shop accurate?
We read all 21 of their named sites through our own Ahrefs-backed checker on 13 September 2026. Two matched the number on the card. Eighteen did not, and five were out by ten points or more: Tinylaunch is shown at DR 41 and reads 73, StartupBase at 48 reads 73, Uneed at 54 reads 75, Landing Folio at 55 reads 65 and BetaList at 66 reads 76. Most gaps run that way, so the sites their shop makes look weakest are some of the strongest links on the shelf.
What are the 'own network' sites in the backlinks.shop catalogue?
Four of the 25 are labelled “own network · Local Authority”: Vancouver Startups at DR 38, Toronto Tech Index at 41, Austin SaaS Review at 43 and Oslo Founders Guide at 36. Every other card in the shop prints the domain you are buying a link from. These four print the words instead of a domain, and they are listed at $2.00 and sold at $1.00, above DevHunt at DR 58 and Uneed at DR 54 which are $0.75 each.
Can you buy a Y Combinator Launch listing for $4?
Launch YC is a surface for YC-funded companies. All 20 of the most recent launches in the live feed carry a YC batch, each one linking back to YC's internal Bookface platform, and the posting route sends a logged-out visitor to the YC homepage. It is the most expensive line in the shop and it is a door that opens from inside the batch.
Is backlinks.shop open for orders?
Not on 13 September 2026. The homepage is the only page that resolves: the shop, the network, the checkout and the order tracker all return 404, there are no published terms, and the site says “5,000+ links at launch”. The testimonials under the wall of love are people saying they joined the list, among them “I signed up, this looks like something I'd use!” and “registered in the waitlist!”. Submitator is open, and the customer links it has delivered are on our home page with the Domain Rating card for each one.
What is the verified network on backlinks.shop?
Their second product: trade links free with other members instead of buying them. Worth knowing what you are joining. Google's spam policies name “excessive link exchanges (‘Link to me and I'll link to you’) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking”. A directory listing is a different thing, because the directory publishes you and gets nothing back. We make the same point at more length on our VerifiedDR page.
What is the cheapest backlinks.shop alternative?
Cheaper depends entirely on how many links you want. Under about ten, they are, because $0.50 a link beats any plan and we do not sell singles. At thirty and above it is Submitator: $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, one-time, against $38.50 for their entire shop of 25. You pick every directory yourself, the Domain Rating is on the card, badges are installed through one component and kept live, and a rejection is credited back as another directory.
Is buying links one at a time a good idea?
The instinct is right and most of this market ignores it. Seeing the site, the price and the traffic before you spend anything beats a flat fee and a spreadsheet that says done. Our disagreement is arithmetic rather than philosophical: per link they are $1.54 on average and we are $0.79 at the top plan, and the picking they charge for is the thing our dashboard does for free.
Comparing options? See the others.
Their whole shop is $38.50 for 25. Our $29 is 30 you pick.
One payment, a catalog of more than 120 directories with the Domain Rating on each card and nofollow marked where it applies, badges installed and kept live where one is wanted, and a rejection swapped for another directory.