The fear people bring to buying links is a penalty. The thing that actually happens is quieter and more common: nothing. The links go live, the report looks full, and six months later the page sits where it started. Wasted link spend is the ordinary outcome of a cheap package, and it is worse than a penalty because nobody sends you a notice.
The arithmetic rules out real outreach below a certain price
Placing one editorial link means building a list, sending pitches, answering replies, agreeing a topic, writing an article and following up until it publishes. Most pitches are ignored. At any honest reply rate that is hours of work per placement. A package priced at twenty dollars a link has not bought those hours, so it has bought something else: a site the seller already controls, or a slot on a page that exists to hold slots. Category guides put the same floor on it in blunter terms, that a link at that price is not a cheap link but spam with an invoice attached.
Private networks fail slowly and take the budget with them
A private blog network is a set of sites one person owns, built to pass authority to clients. They share hosting patterns, templates, publishing schedules and often writers, and those patterns are what gets them found. One published account describes a client spending around fifty thousand dollars a year on links and seeing no movement at all, because every link came from a network. The links were never going to work. The reporting simply did not say so.
The report is the part that is easiest to fake
A spreadsheet of live URLs with authority scores beside them is trivial to produce and tells you nothing about whether a human will ever read the page. Ask for the traffic history of each domain instead, and ask before the placement rather than after. A seller who cannot show you the sites in advance is telling you something about the sites.
What the money is actually for
When you pay a fair price for a placement you are paying for the refusals. The list that got built, the pitches that went nowhere, the three site owners who said no before the fourth said yes. That is the work, and it is the only part that makes the link worth having. A price that does not cover it has not removed the cost, it has moved the cost onto your rankings and delayed the bill.