Affiliate Disclosure

Short version: some links on pmcompared.com are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, the vendor pays us a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it does not change what we write. The longer version of all of that is below, because the details matter.

What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is a normal outbound link with a tracking parameter attached. When you click one and later purchase from that vendor, the vendor's systems credit us a referral commission — usually a percentage of the sale, sometimes a flat fee per signup. The commission comes out of the vendor's customer-acquisition budget. Your price is identical whether you use our link or type the vendor's URL yourself.

How much we earn

Commission rates vary widely by vendor and category. Software affiliate programs typically pay 15-30% of the first year's subscription, one time. Some pay recurring percentages; a few pay only for qualified leads. The exact rate is between us and each vendor and is defined in our agreements with them. We do not publish per-vendor rates because they change, and because a public rate table would suggest rates drive coverage decisions, which they do not.

The firewall: how commissions do not touch our reviews

This is the part that matters, so we will be specific:

• Rankings are set before money enters the picture. Our scoring rubric — features, pricing, support quality, ease of use — is written down before we evaluate anything, and the same rubric applies to every product in a category.
• Higher commission never moves a product up. We rank products that pay us zero commission above products that pay 30% when the testing says so. Several of our top-ranked picks in project and work management tools have no affiliate program at all.
• We cover competitors to programs we belong to. If a vendor kicks us out of their program because of a review, the review stands. This has happened.
• Nobody on the editorial side sees revenue reports tied to specific pages. The person choosing which tools to cover next looks at reader demand and market gaps, not commission tables.

Why we use affiliate links at all

Running this site costs real money: hosting, research time, and the hours that go into each comparison. Affiliate commissions are the least-bad business model we could find. The alternatives are worse: charging readers a paywall, selling your data, or taking vendor money for sponsored "reviews" — which is the thing we refuse to do.

How to spot an affiliate link

Every affiliate link on this site appears inside editorial tables or "visit" buttons in reviews. Hover over a link and your browser's status bar will show the destination domain — if you see a tracking domain or a parameter like ?ref= or ?aff= before the vendor's own URL, that link is an affiliate link. Not every outbound link is one; links to vendor documentation, pricing pages, and news sources are plain links.

What happens if you buy through our links

The vendor tracks your purchase with a cookie that typically lasts 30-90 days. If you buy within that window, we get credited. If you clear cookies, use a different device, or buy through someone else's link first, we get nothing — and the content stays exactly the same either way. If you ask for a refund, the commission reverses and we earn nothing, which is a healthy incentive to not oversell products.

FTC compliance

United States Federal Trade Commission rules require clear disclosure of material connections between publishers and the products they cover. This page is that disclosure. In addition, individual review pages carry a short disclosure notice near the top, before any affiliate link appears. We consider this both a legal requirement and basic honesty.

What we do with the revenue

Commissions pay for hosting and CDN costs, the research time it takes to check vendor documentation and verify pricing, and the work of updating comparisons when vendors ship major versions. Any surplus funds future comparison work — wider category coverage, not fewer products.

Questions

If anything in this disclosure is unclear or seems inconsistent with what you see on a specific page, email us and point at the page. We take conflicts-of-interest questions seriously and fix wording that creates a wrong impression within a day.