I’m not a fan of buying backlinks; a naturally grown backlink profile is far more valuable than a thousand backlinks from Fiverr or any other service.
I share the same view on buying backlinks, it’s risky since you usually have no control, and sellers on various platforms often resell the same "link package" to hundreds or even thousands of people, this just leads to a spammy, unattractive backlink profile, that’s why I prefer investing time in building backlinks organically and manually, the only situation where I’d ever pay for a backlink would be if it came from a very reputable press media portal, but those guest posts can cost anywhere from 500 to 5,000 euros, and even with that, I would be very careful, most of the time, I would only consider using something like that for a specific purpose, for example, building backlinks for an e-commerce website, then I would focus specifically on the subpages of the products, otherwise, the money invested in such expensive guest posts on press media portals just wouldn't be worth it to me, by the way, i used to have an old forum where webmasters could exchange backlinks with each other for free, since that no longer fit the times, I completely rebuilt everything and created a small, free platform where you can easily exchange backlinks with webmasters in various niches without much effort, if you're interested, feel free to check out my DP forum thread.
Buying random backlinks at the bulk Fiverr level is dead, but there's a middle layer most replies are missing where paid links still work: real placements you'd be happy to show a client, sourced one at a time. The cost gap is real. A $50 Fiverr "1,000 backlinks" package is worth less than zero because Google will discount or penalize it, while a single $300 to $800 placement on a niche-relevant site you personally pitched can compound for years. My filter on whether to pay for any link these days is simple. Would the site exist if Google didn't? If yes, it's a real publication and the link probably carries weight. If no, you're paying for a PBN or a recycled guest-post farm, and your money is teaching Google what an unnatural pattern looks like on your domain. Same test for digital PR services. If their pitch decks lead with "high DR sites" rather than naming the publications, run. The shift nobody in this thread has named is that Google's link algorithm now weighs site-level topical authority more than raw DR. A DR 25 site that publishes only in your niche outranks a DR 70 generic news site for niche-relevant link value. That changes what's worth paying for. The expensive press releases on DR 80 outlets that look impressive in a report are often the worst money you can spend, because they're off-topic and Google reads them as commercial signals. The cheaper, harder-to-source niche links are the ones that move rankings.