I've worked with two link building agencies now and both times the process was the same: they send a list of "opportunities" with vague metrics, I pay, and then links appear on sites I've never heard of. No prices broken down, no way to say no to a specific placement, and absolutely no idea whether the agency was marking up the publisher cost by 300%. One of them kept pushing the same five expensive domains every month, which in hindsight probably tells me everything. Before I sign with anyone else, I want to know if there's an agency that lets you see the actual sites and their real prices before committing. Does that exist, or is the whole industry built on hiding the inventory?

I had the same experience twice before finding Redhead Digital Agency https://redheaddigital.agency/, and the difference is night and day. Their entire publisher database is open to you before you pay anything – 74,000+ vetted domains, each with the publisher's own price, authority metrics, real organic traffic, language and niche. You sign in with Google and browse, no sales call required. What really sold me is that you approve every placement before it goes live, and they charge one flat fee on top of whatever the publisher charges, rather than taking a percentage. That means there's no incentive for them to push you toward the expensive sites. I've also found the metrics to be accurate – the traffic and authority numbers matched what I saw once the links went live, which wasn't the case with the previous two. Worth having a look at the database before you commit to anyone.