Affiliate disclosure and editorial policy

Exactly how we make money, which listings pay us, and where our incentives could bite.

6 of our 160 listings earn us a commission when you sign up through them — and 2 of those are products we own outright. They're all named below. The other 154 listings send you straight to the program and earn us nothing. Nobody has ever paid us for placement. This is a small operation with no separate editorial department, so instead of promising you a firewall that doesn't exist, we publish our incentives here and every change we make at /changes.

How we make money

1. Affiliate referral commissions

When you click a Join link on this site and sign up, the program may pay us a commission. It's paid by the program out of their acquisition budget, at no extra cost to you, at the same rate any other affiliate would earn. Those links carry rel="sponsored nofollow" and route through a redirect on our own domain so we can count the click.

Some programs offer second-tier commissions. If someone we referred goes on to refer their own affiliates, we may earn a percentage of that too. Every two-tier program in the directory is listed on the two-tier page, whether we earn from it or not.

2. Featured listings — offered, never sold

We offer featured placement at $99 a month. No program has ever bought it. Until one does, there are no paid placements anywhere on this site, and nothing you see is here because someone paid for it.

3. Network sponsorships — offered, never sold

We offer networks a "preferred network" slot at $1,500 a month. No network has ever bought it either.

Every listing that pays us

This list is generated from our live data every time the site builds, so it can't fall out of date. As of the current build, 6 of 160 listings carry a referral link:

Programs we own (2)

These are our own products. We earn from them and we built them, which is the strongest conflict of interest on this site:

FreeTTS — owned by the person who runs this directory. Disclosed on its program page. Graded on the same scale as everything else.
FreeCV — owned by the person who runs this directory. Disclosed on its program page. Graded on the same scale as everything else.

Third-party programs we earn from (4)

Every other listing in the directory — 154 of 160 — links straight to the program with no referral parameter. We earn nothing from them, and they're listed anyway, because the directory is meant to be useful before it's profitable.

Where our incentives could bite

The biggest risk for any directory is editorial integrity getting quietly sold. Most sites answer this with a page about editorial separation. We can't honestly do that, so here's the real picture:

There is no editorial firewall. This is a small operation. The person who assigns the scores is the same person who benefits from the affiliate links. We can't offer you separation of duties, so we don't claim it.
The Program Score is a human judgment, not a formula. It rates the terms on offer — commission, cookie, recurring, network. It isn't computed mechanically, and there is no payout data behind it. See the methodology for what it is and isn't.
What you can check instead of trusting us: the programs we earn from are named above, and their grades are on their pages. Both programs we own are graded below A. Every change to any listing — including any score change — is published automatically at /changes, so a quiet edit in our own favour would show up on the public record.

FTC and EU DSA compliance

We follow US Federal Trade Commission guidance on affiliate disclosure (16 CFR Part 255) and EU Digital Services Act transparency requirements. In practice:

Affiliate relationships are disclosed on every page that contains an affiliate link, near the top, in plain English
Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored nofollow"
The complete list of paying relationships is on this page, generated from live data
This page is linked from every footer
We own two of the products we list, and say so on their pages as well as here
There is no sponsored content and no paid placement on this site. If that ever changes, it will be labelled before it ships

If you think any disclosure here is insufficient or unclear, email [email protected] and we'll fix it.

What we don't do

We don't accept payment to remove criticism or raise a score.
We don't run sponsored content disguised as editorial.
We don't publish program-owner copy as our own writing.
We don't sell user data. Browsing needs no account. Minimal analytics, no tracking pixels, no retargeting.
We don't publish fake ratings. No invented star ratings or review counts, on the page or in structured data. Programs with no reviews show no reviews.
We don't claim relationships we don't have. An earlier version of this page listed 27 companies we had no affiliate relationship with, and left out 4 we did. That's why the list above is now generated from data rather than written by hand.

FAQ about disclosure

Do affiliate links change what I pay?

No. Affiliate commissions come out of the program's existing customer acquisition budget — money they'd otherwise spend on ads. Routing you through an affiliate link is just a different acquisition channel for them. You pay the same either way.

Can I tell which links are affiliate links?

Yes, three ways. Program pages that pay us carry a disclosure tag near the top. The links use rel="sponsored nofollow". And the full list is on this page — currently 6 of 160 listings.

You own two of the programs you list. Isn't that a conflict?

Yes, and it's the sharpest one here. Our answer isn't that we're above it — it's that you can check it. Both are disclosed on their own pages and named above, both are graded below A on the same scale as every other listing, and any change to those grades is published at /changes. Judge the grades against the terms yourself.

Do featured listings get better treatment?

Nobody has bought a featured listing, so there's nothing to give better treatment to. If that changes, featured will buy position and visibility only — it will be labelled, and it will never buy a Program Score.

How do I know your scores aren't influenced by money?

Don't take it on trust — the score is an editorial judgment, so "check the formula" isn't an option we can honestly offer. What we can offer: the 6 listings that pay us are named on this page, the two we own are graded B+ and B rather than A, and every change to every listing is published automatically at /changes. If our grades started tracking our revenue, the changelog would show it.

If I disagree with a review, can I get it changed?

If you have data showing it's factually wrong, yes — email [email protected] with the specifics. Factual errors get fixed. Editorial conclusions stay as written.