How we make money

A site that tells you whether to buy things owes you a straight answer about how it gets paid. Here it is, without the usual fog.

The short version

Some outbound product links are affiliate links. If you buy through one, the seller pays us a commission. It costs you nothing extra. That is the site's only revenue. There are no sponsored posts, no paid placements, no sold rankings, and nobody has ever paid to appear in a calculator result.

The conflict of interest, stated plainly

Affiliate money creates an obvious temptation: recommend the thing that pays best, and recommend buying over not buying. We deal with that temptation structurally, not with willpower:

The math comes first. Calculators compute their answer from your inputs and the evidence — the affiliate link is attached afterwards, to whatever the arithmetic picked. We have dropped products we could earn more on when the numbers pointed elsewhere; the changes page keeps score.
"Buy nothing" stays on the table. Every tool on this site can conclude you shouldn't buy anything — the outcome that pays us exactly zero — and several regularly do.
No fear-selling. We do not manufacture a threat to sell a fix. Where evidence is thin, the page says the evidence is thin.

Who we currently have affiliate relationships with

Retail programs (such as Amazon's) and individual manufacturer programs for products our calculators can recommend. Where a specific product link earns commission, the page discloses it. Certification claims always link to the certifier's own database, not to the seller.

What we don't do

No sponsored content, ever, in any calculator or evidence review.
No selling or sharing of your data; the calculators run in your browser.
No pay-to-rank: a manufacturer cannot buy a recommendation, a better position, or the removal of a criticism.

If any of this ever stops being true, it changes here first — dated, on the record, like every other correction on this site.