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FATJOE versus buying the sites yourself

FATJOE is the most widely used link supplier in the agency market, and the comparison comes down to one structural difference: they sell you a metric, we sell you a named site. Both are legitimate. They suit different people, and the honest answer depends on how much you want to be involved.

How FATJOE actually works

You order by domain rating tier. Pick DR30, pick a quantity, supply your target URL and anchor, and their team handles everything from there — finding the publisher, writing the article, placing it, reporting back. The content is included in the price.

The part worth understanding is that you do not choose the site, and you do not see it before you order. You are buying a specification — a link on a site with at least this domain rating — and FATJOE decides which site satisfies it. You find out which one when it goes live.

That is not a criticism, it is the product. It is genuinely faster to order a DR30 link than to evaluate forty publishers, and for an agency running placements across dozens of clients that speed compounds. The trade is that the specification is the only thing you control.

Where FATJOE is genuinely better

The lifetime link guarantee is better than ours, and we should say so plainly. FATJOE covers a placement for as long as it exists; our replacement cover runs 365 days. If a link comes down in year three, they replace it and we do not. That is a real advantage and it is not close.

They are also far larger, which matters more than it sounds. Scale means they can absorb a publisher going quiet, a niche drying up, or a sudden order for forty links in one week without it becoming your problem. We are a small operation and a large spike in one niche is something we would have to talk to you about.

And their catalogue reaches places ours does not. Top-tier media placements running into thousands of pounds, brand mention packages, press coverage — those are separate products with separate machinery behind them. If a client needs a placement in a household-name publication, we are the wrong supplier and FATJOE is a reasonable call.

Finally, the done-for-you model is a genuine benefit if nobody on your team has time to evaluate sites. Choosing publishers well takes judgement and an hour you may not have. Handing that over is a legitimate decision, not a lazy one.

Where the difference favours us

You see the site before you pay for it. Every publisher is listed with its domain rating, its traffic, its niches and its price, and you decide. That matters most in the case nobody advertises: when the site that satisfies your DR30 order happens to be a general-interest blog running forty contributed posts a month. It meets the specification exactly and does very little for your client.

Because the site is named, the price is per site rather than per tier. A DR50 placement is not one price with us — it is whatever that particular publisher charges, which across our list ranges considerably. Tier pricing has to average expensive and cheap placements into one number, and you pay the average either way.

You can also check our work before spending anything. The publisher audit runs the same seven checks we ran before a site joined the list, and you can point it at any domain including ours. No tier-based supplier can offer that, because the site is not knowable until after the order.

And there is no content markup you cannot see. Our price is the placement. If you want us to write it we will, and the price on the listing already covers it — there is no separate content line appearing later.

Side by side

FATJOE compared with The Stark SEO across cost, speed, control and flexibility.
 FATJOEThe Stark SEO
Who picks the publisherFATJOE, after you orderYou, before you order
Do you see the site firstNoYes, with metrics and price
Pricing modelBy DR tierPer individual site
Content includedYesYes
Link guaranteeLifetime365 days
Media and PR placementsYes, up to $7,800+No
Can you audit the site firstNot applicableYes, free tool
Minimum orderNoneNone
Pay before or after deliveryBeforeAfter the link is live
Prices

Published prices, August 2026

Published prices, August 2026
PlacementFATJOEThe Stark SEO
Entry level$83 (DR10+ blogger outreach)$50, lowest listed site
Mid tier$138 (DR30)Per site — median $203 across the whole list
Higher authority$386 (DR50)Per site — DR50–69 median $200, range $75–$1,900
Top tier / media$7,800+Not offered
Brand mentions$2,176 for 5, to $7,616 for 20Not offered
Managed packagesFrom $700Not offered — self-serve only
Link guaranteeLifetime365 days
Choose the siteNo — ordered by DR tierYes, before you pay

FATJOE figures are their published August 2026 rates. Ours are read from the live marketplace, so they move as inventory changes. The two are not directly comparable at the tier level, which is rather the point: their DR50 is one price, ours is whatever that publisher charges.

Choosing

Who each one actually suits

Pick FATJOE if

  • You want to order a link the way you order stationery, and not think about it again.
  • You need top-tier media or brand mention coverage, which we do not sell at all.
  • You place high volume across many clients and value throughput over selection.
  • A lifetime guarantee matters more to you than choosing the publisher.

Pick us if

  • You want to see the site, its traffic and its price before committing.
  • You have been burned by a placement that met the metric and did nothing.
  • Your client asks which sites their links are on, and you want a real answer.
  • You would rather pay after the link is live than before.

So which one

If you want to hand the decision over entirely, FATJOE is the better product and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. Their scale, their guarantee and their media reach are all things we do not match.

If the part that worries you is not knowing which site your client's link ends up on, that is precisely the thing tier-based ordering cannot fix — and it is the reason this business exists in the shape it does.

The honest test is simple. Ask your current supplier for the list of sites they would place on before you order. If you are comfortable without one, buy on tiers. If the answer matters to you, buy the site.

The usual questions

For what it is, yes. It is the most established done-for-you supplier in the agency market, the ordering is genuinely frictionless, and the lifetime link guarantee is better than most competitors offer including us. The limitation is structural rather than a quality problem: you order by domain rating and they select the publisher, so you cannot evaluate the site before buying and cannot decline one you would not have chosen.
Their published August 2026 rates run from $83 for a DR10+ blogger outreach placement to $138 at DR30 and $386 at DR50, with top-tier media placements reaching $7,800 and above. Brand mention packages start around $2,176 for five. Pricing is by tier rather than by site, so every DR50 placement costs the same regardless of which publisher it lands on.
FATJOE sells you a specification and chooses the site; we publish the sites and you choose. Everything else follows from that. Their prices are per tier and ours are per publisher, they charge before delivery and we charge after, and you can audit our sites in advance because they are named — which is not possible with an order that has not been assigned a publisher yet.
At the bottom of the range, roughly comparable — their $83 entry against our $50 lowest listed site. Higher up it depends entirely on which publisher you would have chosen, because their $386 DR50 is a single price while our DR50 to 69 band has a median of $200 and a range from $75 to $1,900. If you would have picked an expensive site, tier pricing saves you money. If you would have picked a modest one, you are subsidising someone else's.
No. You specify a domain rating tier and their team selects the publisher that meets it. You see which site it was after the placement goes live. That is the intended design of the product rather than an oversight — it is what makes ordering fast — but it does mean a site you would have rejected can satisfy your order perfectly.
It depends what you found lacking. If it was price or throughput, other tier-based suppliers like The HOTH sit in similar territory. If it was not knowing which sites you were buying, a marketplace where publishers are named is the category to look at — that includes us at 410 vetted sites, and larger self-serve platforms like Adsy where selection is far bigger but the vetting becomes your job.

The other comparison

Adsy versus a list somebody already vetted

Adsy is the closest thing to us in the market and by far the hardest comparison to write honestly, because we are the same shape: a marketplace, publishers named, prices published, you choose. The difference is scale and who checked the sites — and on scale they win outright.

The HOTH versus choosing your own publishers

The HOTH is one of the most recognised names in white label SEO and is usually where an agency starts. The model is a productised menu: fixed products at fixed prices, ordered like items in a shop. Ours is a list of named sites at individual prices. Both work; they suit different temperaments.

Loganix versus a list you can see without asking

Loganix sits at the premium, managed end of this market and is closer to a consultancy than a shop. They run a large database you can filter and an expert-selected service where their team chooses for you. The comparison is mostly about how much of the decision you want to keep.

Hiring in-house versus outsourcing link building

Whether to hire someone or buy the capacity is mostly a question about how many clients you have and how predictable they are. Here is the arithmetic, including the part where hiring wins.

Outreach tools versus buying placements

Outreach tools cost a hundred or two a month against hundreds per placement. That gap is real and worth understanding properly rather than dismissing.

Where these figures came from

Prices quoted for FATJOE are their published rates or as reported by the sources above, correct at the time of writing and liable to change. Ours are read live from the marketplace. Check anything you intend to make a decision on.

Have a look at the list

Every site with its price, nothing to fill in first, and nothing to pay unless a link actually goes live. 365 days of cover on every placement.

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