With SubmitEdge, technically you are paying someone to submit the links to free directories. You aren't paying the actual sites for the links. SubmitEdge gives you the list of directories and I checked a few out and I was able to manually submit links to them as well, so it seems legit. Anyway, the backlinks showed up in Google Webmaster Tools and the site still has a PR 2 and 3230 pages indexed so it clearly wasn't penalized.
