This site is funded by two things, and only two things: display advertising and affiliate commissions from retailers. Both exist for the same basic reason — so comparisons can stay free to read without a subscription or a paywall standing in the way. Neither one decides which product wins a comparison — that decision is made first, using the criteria described on our Methodology page, and the commercial side is layered on afterward.
If you want the fuller version of how that separation actually works, our Declaration of Editorial Independence and Affiliate Disclosure go into more detail. This page focuses specifically on where the money comes from and what it's spent on.
There are exactly two sources, and we're not going to dress up a nonexistent third one to sound more diversified:
Ads served through Google AdSense and shown alongside articles. We don't hand-pick which ad appears on a given page — that's handled by the ad network based on general browsing signals, not by us.
A small percentage of a purchase, paid by the retailer, when someone buys a product after clicking a link from one of our comparisons. It costs the buyer nothing extra.
We're not going to publish a precise revenue split between the two, since it shifts constantly and a specific figure would be stale the moment it's written. What matters more than the exact ratio is that neither source is tied to a promise about which product will be recommended — a promise like that is the one thing we'd never make in exchange for money.
Running a comparison site honestly costs quite a bit more than it might look like from the outside, looking in. This funding covers:
None of this work is especially glamorous, and none of it would exist without some genuine form of revenue behind it. The realistic alternative to advertising and affiliate income isn't some magically neutral, pressure-free funding source — in practice it's either a paywall that limits who can actually read the comparisons, or the site simply not existing at all.
An affiliate link or an ad appearing on a page is not an endorsement from us, and it's not evidence that a particular product is genuinely right for you specifically. A retailer relationship existing doesn't mean the product it's attached to won a comparison — plenty of our comparisons favour a product with no affiliate link at all, simply because it's the better fit based on the evidence.
It also doesn't mean the analysis stops at "does this product exist and can it be bought." Current price, warranty coverage, return policy, delivery time, and regional availability all affect whether a specific purchase makes sense for you, and those details live with the retailer, not with us — always worth checking directly before buying.
Affiliate programs end without much warning, ad networks change their terms periodically, and new funding models sometimes make sense for a site as it genuinely grows over time. This page describes our current, general approach rather than promising that any specific retailer, ad network, or affiliate program will remain in place indefinitely. If our funding model ever changes in a way that genuinely matters to how the site operates day to day, we'll update this page and the related disclosure pages to reflect that honestly and promptly, rather than quietly.
Don't just take this page's word for it. Browse a few comparisons and look at whether the highest-rated products are consistently the ones that would earn us the most commission, or whether the pattern looks mixed. Check whether categories with little to no affiliate potential — cars and EVs, for instance — still get the same depth of critical analysis as categories where commissions are common. A funding model that isn't shaping conclusions should show up as a fairly unremarkable, inconsistent pattern, not a suspiciously tidy one.
If a specific advertising arrangement or affiliate program ever required something incompatible with the principles on this page — approval rights over content, a guaranteed placement regardless of merit, or pressure to soften a genuine criticism — we'd decline it or end it, even at a cost to revenue. We can't prove that commitment to you in the abstract, which is exactly why the rest of this site is built to let you check the pattern of our actual conclusions against the commercial relationships we disclose, rather than asking you to simply trust a promise on this page.
Does a product without an affiliate link get a worse review? No. A product is compared and rated using the same criteria whether or not there's a commercial link attached to it. The absence of a link usually just means that brand or retailer doesn't run an affiliate program, not that we think less of the product.
Do you ever get free products from manufacturers? This varies, and where it happens, our Ethics Code covers how we handle it: receiving a product doesn't buy a favourable conclusion, and a genuine flaw in a product we were sent gets reported the same way it would for a product we bought ourselves.
Is any content on this site sponsored? Not at the time of writing. If that changes, it will be labelled clearly on the specific article, not folded quietly into our general advertising or affiliate relationships.
How can I tell which links are affiliate links? Our Affiliate Disclosure page explains the mechanics in detail, including how to recognise a tracked link and how to navigate directly to a retailer if you'd rather avoid using one.
Does display advertising ever feel inconsistent with recommending that readers avoid clutter or unnecessary spending? It's a fair tension to point out. We try to keep ad placement unobtrusive enough that it doesn't interfere with actually reading a comparison, and we don't control which specific products get advertised — our own editorial recommendations live entirely separately from whatever the ad network happens to be showing that day.
There's no dedicated sales or business development function here negotiating individual deals with brands. Advertising runs through a standard, self-serve ad network rather than direct brand relationships, and affiliate program sign-ups happen through each retailer's own publicly available affiliate portal — the same process available to any publisher, not something negotiated specially for us. This matters quite a bit in practice, because it means there's no single person whose job is specifically to bring in revenue from a particular brand, which removes one of the more common channels through which commercial pressure usually enters a publication.
The people researching and writing comparisons aren't the same people managing ad network settings or affiliate program enrollment, which keeps a bit of organisational distance between the editorial and commercial sides even within a small team. It's a modest safeguard, but a real one.
It's worth being honest that a site like this could, in principle, face a situation where current funding doesn't cover its costs. If that happened, the response would be to look for additional non-compromising revenue — expanding the categories covered, say, or adding advertising in more places — before considering anything that would touch editorial independence, like accepting payment for favourable coverage. We'd rather shrink the site's scope than compromise what it says about the products it does cover.
This page is deliberately narrow: it's about where the money comes from and what it pays for. Questions about how editorial conclusions stay separate from that money belong on our Independence page. Questions about the specific mechanics of affiliate links — how they're tracked, where they appear, how to avoid them — belong on our Affiliate Disclosure page. And the broader standards we hold our writing to, including how conflicts of interest get disclosed, are covered in our Ethics Code. Reading all four together gives a fuller picture than any one of them alone.
Some sites that discuss their funding model publish specific numbers — monthly ad revenue, affiliate conversion rates, and so on. We've chosen not to, for a fairly practical reason: those figures change constantly, and a specific number published today would be stale and potentially misleading within weeks. Rather than publish a number that creates a false sense of precision, we've focused this page on the structural question that actually matters to a reader — not exactly how much money comes in, but whether that money has any route to shaping a conclusion.
If you have a specific question about our financial model that isn't answered by this structural explanation, the Contact page is the right place to ask, and we'll answer as directly as we reasonably can.
If you've read this far and are still sceptical, that's a reasonable place to land. Every ad-and-affiliate-funded site has a reason to claim independence, and claims are cheap. What we'd actually suggest is this: don't evaluate our funding model by what this page says about it. Evaluate it by reading a handful of comparisons across different categories and checking whether the pattern holds up — whether a cheaper, lower-commission product sometimes wins, whether a flaw in a popular, well-affiliated product gets mentioned, whether a category with no commercial potential at all still gets serious treatment.
A funding model that's actually separated from editorial conclusions should produce a messy, inconsistent relationship between commission size and outcome, because the conclusions are being driven by something else entirely — the evidence. A funding model that's secretly driving conclusions would produce a suspiciously tidy one. That's a testable claim, not just a reassurance, and it's the test we'd want you to run.
As our funding sources change — a new affiliate program, an ad network change, any shift in how the site is supported — this page is updated to reflect the current reality rather than describing an arrangement we've since moved away from. If you ever notice something on this page that doesn't match what you observe about the site in practice, that mismatch is worth reporting through the Contact page, since it likely means this page needs a correction.