Revenue disclosure

How we make money

Free to read, with a free, openly licensed core dataset. We earn from Amazon's affiliate program: Amazon pays us a percentage of qualifying purchases made through our Amazon links, at rates it sets per product category, so within a category a pricier purchase pays us more. Amazon also makes some of the products and services we rank. Our grades and sort orders never read commission data. No other company we list pays us anything, and nobody can pay to be listed, ranked, scored, corrected faster or removed. We never ask for, require, trade for or reward a link.

Amazon's affiliate program

Some outbound links go to Amazon with our Associates tag. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. When you make a qualifying purchase through one of those links, Amazon pays us a percentage of it. Amazon sets that percentage per product category, so it is not the same on every product, and within a category a pricier purchase pays us more.

On a few gear pages we also link to free trials of Kindle Unlimited, Amazon Prime, Amazon Music Unlimited and Audible. Amazon may pay us a fixed fee when a qualifying sign-up starts through one of those links.

Amazon also makes some of the products and services we rank. They are graded by the same published rules as everything else, and those rules never read commission data.

These links are marked rel="sponsored" and labelled plainly ("Check current price at …"). A click alone earns us nothing, which is why our price-drop watch, built to tell you to wait for a better price, works against our own affiliate revenue.

What nobody can buy

No other company we list pays us anything. Nobody can pay to be listed, ranked, scored, corrected faster or removed. Listing is free and needs no vendor's consent or payment, and error corrections are free for everyone, always — accuracy is never paywalled. We also decline directed brand partnerships and paid "feature our product" pitches: no brand can buy a review, a score or a better placement here, at any price. We never ask for, require, trade for or reward a link.

The core dataset is free to download under an attribution license (CC BY 4.0). Nobody pays us to license it.

Why structure, not just words

Independence here is structural, not a slogan. Default ordering is a published, versioned algorithm computed from the data itself, and each dated entry of our hash-chained audit ledger commits to the product and software records as they stood that day. Because Amazon pays more on some products than on others, a ranking that read the commission could lean toward them. Ours cannot, because no grading or ordering code reads a commission rate, an affiliate link or a sign-up fee. The Deskmark, for one, reads prices and how openly they are published, specs, release dates, listed features and integrations, and regulators' stop-use warnings, and uses how complete a record is only to break ties. Its inputs and weights are on the Deskmark page.

Questions about a listing or this disclosure? Email [email protected], or read each section's methodology from its index.