indiehackers.com: a contextual link, and whether it is worth $130

At 82 DA, the practical constraint is not price, it is whether your article is good enough to survive a real editor.

General-interest publications are the workhorses of a link profile and the easiest place to overpay. The article shape that works is boringly specific: a problem, the method used, what happened, what it cost. A general title with 434k monthly visits survives because it answers questions well, not because it loves contributors, so a piece with nothing verifiable in it gets edited down to a bio link.

Within the General section of the index — 1,576 listings, 39 median DA, 5k median traffic, $70 median price — this placement is 86% above the median on cost and about 78.9× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $130 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.

Where indiehackers.com is not a topical match for your market, buy it for that plausibility and for whatever brand exposure comes free, and put your exact-match anchors on the sites that genuinely cover your subject. That one discipline is the difference between a general guest post strengthening a profile and the same link making it look synthetic.

Mixed link policy on this host, so the placement URL is what we verify rather than the domain. Ask for the section you will be published in and we will confirm the attribute before you pay.

Two comparisons decide whether indiehackers.com at $130 is a good buy: this listing against the 1,576 other General entries we index, and against the whole 2,000-site index. The gap between those two answers is where a price is either justified or inherited from a rate card nobody revisited.

The arithmetic a buyer should see: 433,800 estimated visits a month, $130 per placement, so $0.30 per thousand visits for a mixed / stated at order link on a site scoring 82 DA and 75 PA. Snapshot September 2026; availability and the exact link attribute are confirmed on the live URL before an invoice, which is the only part of this page that changes week to week.

indiehackers.com out-ranks 99% of the index on audience size (about 78.9× the index median) and 100% on authority. The placement costs $0.30 per thousand estimated visits, and cheaper per visit than 69% of the DA 70+ band. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $130 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• Agencies filling a monthly quota with links nobody will object to.
• Local and service businesses whose market has few specialist publications left.
• Thin profiles where diversity matters more than raw authority.
• Do not buy this if the site's topical distance from your market needs three paragraphs of explanation. Relevance has to be obvious to a crawler reading the neighbourhood.
• Do not buy this as part of a burst. 14–21 days is the delivery window for one placement; a month's worth of placements across several hosts is the pattern that works.

Pitch angle: a data note built from something you have measured. That is the shape we take to a General audience, because it is the version the host's own editor has a reason to keep.

• Keep the tone flat No superlatives, no promises about outcomes, no invented before-and-after. The style that survives editorial review in General is the style that sounds like someone reporting on their own work.
• Write 900–1,300 words Long enough to be worth crawling and citing, short enough that a real desk will read all of it. Anything longer gets skimmed and trimmed, and trimming is where links go.
• Name a real author A person with a title and a bio. Anonymous contributions on General sites are the first thing an editor distrusts, and the first thing a reader discounts.

Anchor plan for this host

• no two anchors to the same target page from one article
• a descriptive anchor that repeats a phrase the article already uses naturally

• Ownership. Several of the listings in our index turn out to share a publisher or an ad network. Relevance does not multiply when five links come from one hand, so we check the footer, the registration and the ad slots.
• Whether the exact placement URL is indexable. A 82 DA domain happily serves noindexed contributor pages. We read the robots meta tag on the article template, not on the homepage.
• Template stability. Redesigns and CMS migrations kill placements. We check the age of the site's oldest surviving article as a proxy for how long a page there tends to live.
• Disclosure policy. Whether the host labels paid contributions. A label costs you nothing in link value and protects the host from the penalty that removes the page.

1. You send the target URL and your angle The page you want the link to point at, the subject, and any author you want credited. Five minutes of input.
2. We confirm availability on indiehackers.com Publisher slots move week to week, including on 82 DA properties. Nothing is promised until the section and the placement URL are confirmed, and we tell you before you pay if the slot has gone.
3. You approve the brief and the shortlist Where the host gives a choice of section or existing article, we send options with the numbers that matter: traffic, indexation, neighbours.
4. The article is drafted and edited for the host Written for indiehackers.com's audience rather than for your keyword, then checked against the site's own style before submission.
5. The host publishes; we verify the live URL Placement live, correct target, link attribute as recorded, indexable. Only then does the order count as delivered.
6. You get the report, and the replacement cover starts PDF and CSV with the live URL, anchor, placement date and target page. Twelve-month replacement on the link itself, no ticket required.

Rates on this kind of listing drift with the host's own demand, so $130 is a current figure rather than a locked one. Volume changes the maths: a second placement on the same domain is usually refused, whereas a second placement across the General section of our index at the same budget is easy to arrange.

What comes with this placement

• 12-month replacement cover: if the link drops, we rebuild it.
• The article itself, drafted to the host's style and edited before submission.
• Anchor and target page exactly as approved in the brief, or the placement is not counted.
• Live-URL verification, with a dated record of the placement.

Browse the index: all 2,000 briefs · General listings · domains beginning I (97) · DA 70+ band (13)