$85 on a 40 DA host works out at $2.33 per 1,000 estimated visits, cheaper per visit than 81% of the DA 40-49 band.
There is a second job these placements do that is worth naming: they make a young or thin profile look normal. A domain that acquires 40-level links from a spread of ordinary publications, in drips, over months, looks like a business that has been around. A domain that acquires forty links from aggressive networks in a fortnight looks like a campaign, and it is the pattern rather than the individual link that gets noticed.
Within the General section of the index — 1,576 listings, 39 median DA, 5k median traffic, $70 median price — this placement is 21% above the median on cost and about 6.6× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $85 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.
Where newspagebuilder.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.
The index lists this property's editorial links as followed. Availability of a followed link changes with the site's monetisation decisions, so we confirm the tag on the live URL before counting delivery.