At $40 this is a budget listing; the maths still has to work, and it works when the page is topical and the host is active.
Tech audiences are the least tolerant of marketing dressed as engineering, and the editors of these sites know it. The pieces that get published, indexed and then linked to by other people are the ones with a claim, evidence and a reproducible method. Anything that reads like a feature list gets cut back to two sentences and a bio link.
Within the Technology section of the index — 53 listings, 41 median DA, 15.5k median traffic, $40 median price — this placement is within a few percent of the median on cost and about 7.1× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $40 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.
Expect editorial standards to be enforced on the structure as well as the tone: no thin affiliate comparisons, no recycled press copy, links that go somewhere the reader needs rather than somewhere you want. Sites with 39.1k monthly visits cannot survive publishing filler, so write for their reader first and your anchor second.
Our observation on this host is do-follow outbound links in editorial content. That is the attribute, not the value: the 42 DA and 39.1k monthly visits are what the attribute is attached to.