1. Cloud stacks
Pages published on major cloud platforms with a contextual link in the body. Cost sits between $3 and $9 per link depending on volume.
They are cheap because the hosting is free and the build is repeatable. They are worth buying because the hosts are crawled constantly, so indexation is fast and the pages do not disappear. The mechanics are covered in what is cloud stacking and how does it work.
The quality question is really a copy question. A stack page with 400 words of unique, on-topic text behaves like any other low-authority contextual link. A spun page behaves like nothing at all.
Good for: breadth, tier-two links pointed at assets you already paid for, new sites. Not good for: moving a competitive commercial term on their own.
Cheap is not the same as low quality. Cheap usually means the supply is automated or the host gives the hosting away.
2. Press releases
Most syndicated press release links are nofollow. That is a fair criticism and also an incomplete one.
Google treats the rel="nofollow" attribute as a hint rather than a directive, and a wire distribution puts your brand name and URL on dozens of news domains with genuine authority. A minority of pickups publish followed links anyway, because the receiving site strips the attribute during import.
The price collapse is the real story. Traditional wires quote $300 to $2,000 per release. Newer distributors sell the same style of syndication for well below $100 — PR Now starts at $15 per release with same-day distribution and a report listing every live placement.
There is a second reason to bother in 2026: press releases are heavily represented in the sources large language models pull from when they summarise a brand. A cheap release that gets picked up by news aggregators is one of the few ways to plant a factual, structured description of your business where machines will read it.
Good for: brand entity building, unlinked-mention conversion, appearing in the sources AI assistants cite. Not good for: anyone counting followed links only, or expecting a release to rank a page.
3. Podcast backlinks
Appear as a guest on a small show. The show notes carry a followed link to your site, and the episode syndicates to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and a dozen aggregators, each republishing the description with the link intact.
Doing it yourself costs only time: pitch ten small shows in your field and two will say yes. The links are editorial by definition, because a human invited you.
If you want the volume without the outreach, podcast backlink services publish an episode about your business and push it to 150+ podcast platforms starting at $39, with same-day delivery, indexing and a full report of every placement. Per referring domain, that is one of the cheapest legitimate link buys available.
Good for: real relevance, author entity signals, experience and expertise evidence, cheap referring-domain breadth. Not good for: placing a link inside a specific topical article.
4. Guest posts through reseller platforms, not agencies
The same placement often costs three times more through an agency than through the marketplace the agency itself buys from. Cutting that layer out is the entire saving.
Marketplaces such as GP Marketplace or iCopify list inventory directly from site owners, and prices start from around $5 on small sites, rising to $40 to $120 for the mid-tier niche placements an agency would quote at $250 plus.
Vet before you buy. Check whether the site ranks for anything, whether the blog section is walled off from the rest of the site, and how many outbound commercial links sit on recent posts. A $5 placement on a site with 300 outbound links to unrelated casinos is not a bargain.
Good for: mid-tier topical relevance at sane cost, and building a few genuinely on-topic links per money page. Not good for: sites that resell to everyone — do not buy twice from the same host in the same quarter.
5. UGC on premium, under-used platforms
AI website builders, no-code app hosts, design galleries and developer sandboxes. These platforms carry very high authority and almost no link-building competition, because most people have not thought of them yet.
Publish something genuinely useful — a template, a public demo, a project page, a design file — and the project or profile page links out. Cost is zero plus an hour of work. Places worth ten minutes of your time include Lovable, Figma Community and Notion, all of which host public pages that get crawled constantly.
The links are usually marked as user-generated, which is fine. The value is the referring domain, the occasional real visitor, and the fact that a page like this is hard for a competitor to copy without doing the same work.
Good for: unusual, hard-to-replicate footprints and genuine referral traffic. Not good for: anyone hoping to automate it, which is precisely what would ruin it.
How to mix them
Roughly: cloud stacks for breadth, one podcast a month for relevance, a reseller guest post per quarter per money page, a press release per genuine announcement, and UGC whenever you build something worth showing.
A $500 month buys all five. A $5,000 month buys the same five with better guest posts, not five times more of anything. Volume is the cheapest thing to add and the least likely to help.
Then index everything. Details in 3 most underrated and affordable link building strategies, and the honest limits of the cheapest layer in do cloud stacking backlinks help SEO.
Marcus Scott
Head of fulfilment, Cloud Stacking
Marcus has built links for a living since 2011. He now runs the team that publishes every stack we deliver, and he still checks the index reports himself.
Ready to test a batch?
Ten links, built and indexed the same day, with the full CSV report attached.
Create an account