How we make money
Every site that recommends software has an incentive problem. Here is ours, stated plainly, so you can weigh what you read accordingly.
The two revenue sources
| Source | How it works | Who chooses |
|---|---|---|
| Affiliate commissions | Some vendor links pay a commission if you follow them and buy. The price you pay does not change. | We choose which vendors to link to. Many of them pay nothing. |
| Display advertising | Google AdSense places ads automatically on article pages. | Google chooses the advertisers. We do not, and cannot, sell placement to anyone. |
There is no sponsored content, no paid reviews, no paid placement in any ranking or table, and no vendor has ever been given approval over a page before publication. If that ever changes, it will be labelled on the page itself.
The rules this money does not get to break
- A tool is included because it is a realistic answer to the question, whether or not there is any commercial relationship.
- A free tool can be, and often is, the top recommendation.
- A paid tool is rejected when it is wrong for the use case, regardless of what it pays.
- Weaknesses, pricing pressure and migration risk get stated even when they cost us the click.
- “Keep what you have” is a valid conclusion, and several pages here reach it.
The bias we cannot fully remove
Commission-funded publishing pays better when the answer is “buy this” than when it is “you do not need anything”. We handle that by publishing the second answer where it is true — but it still shapes which topics get written about at all. A site funded this way covers paid software more thoroughly than free and open-source tooling. Read any affiliate-funded site, this one included, with that in mind.
Several tools here pay us nothing
Some of the products recommended most often on this site run no affiliate programme that we take part in. They are covered, compared and recommended on exactly the same terms as everything else. This is worth stating because “best X alternatives” lists elsewhere frequently contain only tools with affiliate programmes — which is a very different list from the honest one.
Related
- Affiliate disclosure The formal disclosure and how to spot a paying link.
- Editorial policy What every page has to do before it is published.
- Methodology What the research is based on.