Disclosure

This site runs on affiliate commissions, plain and simple. We're not a nonprofit and we're not pretending otherwise — here's exactly how the money side works and, more importantly, what it doesn't touch.

Where the Money Comes From

Most outbound links to a vendor's signup page are affiliate links. If you sign up through one and later become a paying customer, we get a commission from the vendor, typically within a window their program defines. You pay the same price either way; the commission comes out of the vendor's marketing spend, not your invoice.

The Line We Don't Cross

The commission rate on a tool has zero influence on its score. Scoring happens against the fixed criteria on our Methodology page, and the person doing the testing doesn't reference commission structures while writing a review. We've published reviews where a lower-paying or non-paying tool outranks a higher-paying one, because that's what the testing showed.

What Would Make Us Say No

We turn down tool submissions that don't clear our testing bar, regardless of the partnership terms offered. We don't accept payment for a guaranteed positive review — that's not a service we sell, at any price. And we don't let a vendor preview, edit, or approve a review before it goes live; the first time a company sees our writeup is the same moment you do.

How We Handle Pushback

Vendors occasionally disagree with a score or a specific claim. When that happens, we re-check the specific point in question — and if we got something wrong, we fix it and note the correction. What we don't do is soften a conclusion because a company is unhappy with it. A negative review stays negative unless the underlying facts change.

If We Ever Add Something New

Right now, affiliate commissions are the only way this site makes money. If that ever expands — sponsored posts, for instance — it'll be disclosed here specifically and labeled directly on the content itself, not folded quietly into this page months later.

Something Doesn't Add Up?

If you think a specific review reads like it was influenced by a commercial relationship, tell us which one and why through our Contact page. We'd rather hear about it directly than have it become a pattern nobody flags.

Our Actual Relationship With the Vendors We Cover

We don't have exclusivity deals, we don't get early access in exchange for coverage, and we don't run a "preferred partner" tier that scores differently from everyone else. A vendor we've never spoken to and a vendor we have an active affiliate relationship with go through the identical testing process, get read by the same writer, and are held to the same bar. The only thing an affiliate relationship changes is whether a click through our link happens to earn us something — never what we write about what we found.

Why We Publish This Page At All

Plenty of review sites bury this disclosure in a footer link nobody clicks, or word it vaguely enough that "may receive compensation" reads as a formality rather than an actual explanation. We'd rather spell out exactly how the money works, because a reader who understands the incentive can judge our reviews more fairly than one left to guess at it.

What We'd Want to Know as Readers Ourselves

We read plenty of review sites in other categories — electronics, software, otherwise — and the ones we trust most are the ones that are specific about money rather than vague about it. That's the standard we're trying to hold ourselves to here: not "no incentives exist," which would be untrue, but "here's exactly what the incentive is and exactly where the line is that it can't cross."