How this site makes money, in plain English

How this site makes money

This desk has four revenue sources, and all four are disclosed wherever they apply:

• Affiliate commissions — paid by a company when a reader opens an account or buys through a tracked link. Disclosed at the top of every review that contains one.
• Sponsored placements — a flat fee paid to review a product. Disclosed above the article body, in the page metadata, and named in the review's testing record.
• Advisory work — private teardowns and consulting, never published, and never turned into coverage.
• Reader support — voluntary contributions from readers, which carry no influence over coverage.

What a commission does not buy

A commercial relationship buys a link. It does not buy a score, a ranking, a recommendation or silence.

Concretely: the verdict and the weighted score are finalised in the document before any affiliate link is inserted. If a re-review lowers a verdict to not-recommended, every commercial link is stripped from that page the same day, regardless of what it earns. Two reviews in the current library carry no links for exactly that reason.

Sponsors receive no copy approval, no advance sight of the draft, no embargo and no right of removal. That condition is in the contract, not just on this page.

How commercial links are marked

Every commercial link on this site carries rel="sponsored nofollow" in the page source. You can confirm this by viewing source on any review — it is not a claim that requires trusting me.

Disclosure appears above the article body on every affected page, never only in the footer, and never behind a click. Where a review is sponsored, the word 'sponsored' appears in the disclosure block, in the schema.org metadata, and in the listing card in the library.

This is not financial advice

I am a product reviewer, not a licensed financial adviser, broker or agent. Nothing on this site is personal financial, investment, tax or legal advice, and nothing here accounts for your circumstances, obligations or risk tolerance.

Financial products carry risk. Credit products can cost far more than their headline rate if balances are carried. Insurance policies contain exclusions that may mean a claim is not paid. Terms, fees and eligibility change without notice and vary by jurisdiction.

Always read the product's own terms, fee schedule and product disclosure documents before applying, and take independent advice if the decision matters. Where a review states a fee or rate, it states the date it was checked — use that date to judge whether it is still current.

Regulated categories

Personal finance content on this site is written for a general audience and is not a financial promotion targeted at any specific regulated market. Products are only reviewed where they are licensed in a market that can be named in the review.

The following are excluded from coverage entirely: unlicensed investment schemes, products promising guaranteed or fixed returns, signal-selling and copy-trading services, multi-level marketing structures, and any credit product marketed principally on the speed of approval rather than its cost.

Corrections policy

Errors get corrected in public. If you find one, send it to the corrections address with supporting evidence.

Verified factual errors are corrected within 48 hours and recorded in the review's dated changelog. Corrections are never made silently — the changelog on every review is a permanent, visible audit trail, and it records score decreases as well as increases.

If an error favoured a commercial partner, the changelog entry says so explicitly.

Use of AI tools

No review body on this site is generated by an AI model. Every published review follows hands-on testing by a person, and the measurements come from that testing.

AI tools are used for three narrow tasks, disclosed here for completeness: transcribing my own screen recordings, spell and grammar checking, and generating alt text for images which is then reviewed by hand. No AI system decides a score, writes a verdict, or produces a factual claim.

Advertising compliance

This site is operated to be compliant with the disclosure standards that apply to affiliate publishing across the markets it reaches:

• US FTC 16 CFR Part 255 — material connections disclosed clearly and conspicuously, before the endorsement rather than after it.
• EU/UK consumer protection rules on hidden advertising — paid content labelled as such at the point of exposure.
• Vietnamese advertising and e-commerce regulations applicable to a domestic publisher.
• Network-specific terms for each affiliate programme, including trademark-bidding and traffic-source restrictions.
• GDPR-aligned data handling: analytics with IP anonymisation, no advertising identifiers, no data sold or shared with partners.

Conflicts of interest

Every conflict I am aware of is declared at intake, before testing begins, and is published in the review it affects.

Standing declarations: I hold no equity in any company reviewed on this site. I accept no board seats, advisory roles or retainers from companies in categories I review. Where I personally use a product as a paying customer, that is stated in the review — it is usually the reason the review exists.