Verdict: Consider — 6.5/10
The job it does is genuinely useful and nobody else in this batch does it. But the $69 entry plan is so much weaker than the $138 one that buying it is usually a mistake.
Best for: someone who has paid for links or spent months earning them and wants to know when they disappear — starting at Plan 2, not Plan 1. Skip if: your link profile is small enough that Search Console plus a quarterly manual check covers it, or you need a polished interface and fast support.
How we reach a verdict: our testing and review method.
Affiliate link. If you buy through it we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes a verdict — two of our fifteen reviews are Skips. Full disclosure.
Backlink Monitor watches backlinks you have already acquired and alerts you when one is removed, its anchor text changes, its rel attribute changes, or the linking page is de-indexed. AppSumo’s ten plans run from $69 to $690. Plan 1 covers 250 links; Plan 2, at double the price, covers 2,500.
At a glance
| AppSumo Plan 1 price | $69 |
| Plans available | 10 linear plans, $69 to $690 (AppSumo product page) |
| AppSumo rating | 4.63★ from 30 reviews (AppSumo product-page structured data) |
| Vendor subscription | UNKNOWN — could not verify (see below) |
| Deal status | Live, no announced end date |
| Last verified | 6 August 2026 |
Thirty reviews at 4.63★ is a modest but not negligible sample. It is enough to suggest the tool works as described and not enough to tell you much about long-term reliability or how support behaves after a year.
Affiliate disclosure: the AppSumo links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We publish Skip verdicts and negative sections on this site; commission does not move a verdict.
Check the current Backlink Monitor deal on AppSumo
The break-even maths
We cannot do the usual calculation here, and it is worth explaining exactly why rather than filling the gap with a plausible-looking number.
The vendor’s own recurring pricing is UNKNOWN. We were not able to verify an independent subscription price for this product. AppSumo’s listing states a regular annual value of $1,449 to $9,500 across the plan range, but we could not confirm that figure against a vendor pricing page. An unverified struck-through price is not a basis for a break-even calculation. If we divided $69 by an annual value we could not source, we would be publishing arithmetic that looks rigorous and is actually invented — which is exactly what we criticise other lifetime-deal sites for doing.
So we will not compute months-to-break-even for this tool. If the vendor publishes verifiable pricing later, we will update this section and date the change.
What we can do is compare the plans against each other, because those figures are on the AppSumo page and are internally consistent.
Cost per monitored link, one-time:
| Plan | Price | Links/mo | Domains | Cost per link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $69 | 250 | 5 | $0.276 |
| 2 | $138 | 2,500 | 20 | $0.055 |
| 3 | $207 | 4,000 | 35 | $0.052 |
| 4 | $276 | 6,500 | 60 | $0.042 |
| 10 | $690 | 9,500 | UNKNOWN | $0.073 |
Plans 5 through 9 sit between $276 and $690; their individual link and domain allowances are UNKNOWN — the AppSumo page does not break them out in a form we could verify, so we have not filled them in.
The pattern in that table is the single most important thing in this review. Plan 1 costs five times as much per monitored link as Plan 2. Doubling your spend from $69 to $138 multiplies your capacity by ten. There is no other point in the ladder where the value shifts anything like that sharply — Plans 2, 3 and 4 are all priced sensibly relative to each other, and the top plan is actually worse per link than Plan 4.
Assumptions, stated:
- All plan figures from the AppSumo product page, 6 August 2026.
- Cost per link is a one-time cost divided by a monthly allowance. It is a comparison device for ranking the plans against each other, not a running cost. It says nothing about whether the tool is worth buying at all — only which rung of the ladder is priced fairly.
- Because vendor pricing is unverified, this review cannot tell you whether the deal is cheap relative to the market. It can only tell you which plan is cheap relative to the others.
Our framework for handling exactly this situation — a deal where the comparison price cannot be established — is in how to evaluate a lifetime deal. The short version: when you cannot verify the alternative, judge the tool on whether the absolute price is worth the absolute benefit, and ignore the discount percentage entirely.
What it actually does
Link monitoring is an unglamorous category and a real one. If you have spent money or months acquiring backlinks, those links decay. Editors update posts and drop outbound links. Site owners add rel="nofollow" sitewide after a policy change. Pages get pruned. Domains lapse. Nobody tells you when any of this happens, and the effect on your rankings arrives weeks before you notice the cause.
Backlink Monitor watches a list of links you supply and flags four events:
Removal. The link is no longer on the page.
Anchor text change. The link is still there but the words have changed — which matters if you paid for a specific anchor, and matters more if it changed to something you would not have chosen.
Rel attribute change. A followed link becoming nofollow, sponsored or ugc. This is the change most likely to go unnoticed indefinitely, because the link still visibly exists.
De-indexing. The linking page has dropped out of the index, which usually means the link has stopped passing anything.
The domain allowance is the second constraint alongside the link count. Plan 1’s five domains means five of your properties — fine for a solo site owner, immediately limiting for anyone managing clients.
Plan breakdown
| Plan | Price | Links/mo | Domains |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $69 | 250 | 5 |
| 2 | $138 | 2,500 | 20 |
| 3 | $207 | 4,000 | 35 |
| 4 | $276 | 6,500 | 60 |
| 5–9 | $345–$621 | UNKNOWN | UNKNOWN |
| 10 | $690 | 9,500 | UNKNOWN |
Source: AppSumo product page, 6 August 2026. Plans 5 through 9 are priced linearly in $69 increments; their allowances are not published in a form we could verify and we have not estimated them.
Which plan to buy. Plan 2 at $138, for almost everybody. It is the only recommendation in this review we would defend strongly. 2,500 links and 20 domains covers a serious personal site or a small agency’s client roster, and at $0.055 per link it is priced fairly.
Plan 4 at $276 has the best per-link economics in the range and 60 domains. If you manage links at agency scale, that is the efficient purchase.
Plan 1 at $69 is the one we would talk you out of. More on that below.
Plan 10 at $690 is worse per link than Plan 4 and should only be bought for the domain allowance, which we could not verify.
Who should skip this
Skip Plan 1. This is the primary warning of this review. At $69 you get 250 monitored links and 5 domains. Plan 2 costs $69 more and gives you 2,500 links — ten times the capacity for double the money. Two hundred and fifty links is a small profile; if you are doing enough link building to need monitoring at all, you will hit that ceiling quickly and be left choosing between paying again and monitoring only a fraction of your profile. Buy Plan 2 or reconsider whether you need the tool.
Skip the product entirely if your link profile is small or slow-moving. If you have earned forty links over two years, Google Search Console’s links report plus a quarterly manual spot check will tell you what you need to know, for nothing. Monitoring earns its price when you have enough links that you cannot hold them in your head and enough churn that changes are happening between your checks.
Skip it if you have not been actively acquiring links. Monitoring is a tool for protecting an investment. If there is no investment — if your links arrived organically and you did not pay for or pursue any of them — there is much less to protect, and the money is better spent on earning the first tranche. Our Respona review covers the acquisition side.
Skip it if interface quality matters to you. Reviewers describe the UI as clunky, and this is a tool you will look at repeatedly.
Skip it if you need responsive support. Slow support response is a recurring complaint, and for a monitoring product that you depend on to fire alerts, a support queue you cannot get answers from is a real operational risk.
And skip it if you cannot get comfortable buying without a verifiable comparison price. We could not establish what this product costs outside AppSumo. That is a legitimate reason to wait.
Known problems
From the AppSumo review text:
Clunky UI. The most common criticism. Functional but dated, by the account of people using it. For a tool whose whole output is a list and some alerts, this matters less than it would elsewhere — but it does not help.
Slow support responses. Also recurring, and more concerning. Monitoring tools fail silently: if the crawler stops running, you do not get an alert about the missing alerts. When something goes wrong you need support to answer, and reviewers report waiting.
Beyond the review text, the structural problem is already covered above: the Plan 1 allowance is out of proportion with the rest of the ladder. That is a pricing choice rather than a bug, but it functions as a trap for buyers anchored on the $69 headline.
Alternatives
Respona (AppSumo lifetime deal, $79 T1). The acquisition side of the same problem. Respona finds outreach opportunities, discovers contact addresses and runs personalized sequences from your own inboxes. If you are choosing between spending $69 on watching links and $79 on earning them, and you do not yet have many links, earn first. Note that Respona’s 5.00★ rating rests on only 11 reviews — details in our Respona review.
WP 301 Redirects (AppSumo lifetime deal, $49, single tier). Solves the adjacent problem you are more likely to actually have: broken links and 404s on your own site, across up to 20 WordPress properties. It is not backlink monitoring, but a link that points at a 404 on your site is just as wasted as a link that was removed, and this is the cheaper and better-evidenced purchase — 4.85★ from 281 reviews, the strongest evidence base in our WordPress set. See the WP 301 Redirects review.
Google Search Console plus a manual check (non-LTD, free). GSC’s links report shows you which sites link to you and updates over time. It will not alert you, it will not tell you about anchor or rel changes, and it lags. But it costs nothing, and for a profile under a hundred links a quarterly half-hour with a spreadsheet genuinely covers the same ground. This is the right answer for more readers than the tool vendors would like.
See how it fits the wider set in our best SEO tool lifetime deals roundup.
FAQ
Why doesn’t this review have a break-even calculation? Because the vendor’s own recurring price could not be verified. AppSumo states a regular annual value of $1,449 to $9,500, but we could not confirm that against a vendor pricing page, and we will not build arithmetic on an unverified number.
Should I buy Plan 1 at $69? Usually no. Plan 1 covers 250 links; Plan 2 covers 2,500 for $138. Doubling the price gives you ten times the capacity. Plan 1 costs five times as much per monitored link as Plan 2.
Which plan is best value? Plan 4 at $276 has the lowest cost per monitored link ($0.042) plus 60 domains. Plan 2 at $138 is the sensible starting point for most individual site owners.
What changes does it detect? Link removal, anchor text changes, rel attribute changes (such as a followed link becoming nofollow), and de-indexing of the linking page.
Is 30 reviews enough to trust? It is a modest sample — enough to suggest the tool functions as described, not enough to tell you how it holds up over years or how support performs. Weigh it accordingly.
Can I do this for free? Partly. Google Search Console shows who links to you and costs nothing, but it does not alert you and does not track anchor or rel changes. For a small profile it is a reasonable substitute.
Last verified: 6 August 2026. AppSumo figures from the product-page structured data. Vendor pricing could not be verified and is recorded as UNKNOWN. We re-check deal status and attempt vendor verification on every refresh.
Reviewed by the LifetimeDealHQ editorial team. See how we test and our editorial policy.