Affiliate Disclosure
Some links on We Actually Tested are affiliate links: if you buy through them, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate status never influences scores, ranking order, or review content. Services with no affiliate program are ranked on exactly the same scale as those with one.
How affiliate links work here
When we review a service and it happens to have an affiliate program, we may use an affiliate link in the “Visit” buttons. If you click and purchase, the service pays us a percentage. You pay the same price either way. Links marked rel="sponsored" in our code are affiliate links; unmarked ones are not.
The rules that protect you
- Testing comes before monetization. We purchase and test every service before checking whether it has an affiliate program. Scores are locked to measurement data, not commission rates.
- Scoring math excludes affiliate status. The weights on every comparison page are fixed and published. “Has an affiliate program” is not a variable.
- Negative findings stay published. If an affiliate partner degrades, its score drops publicly — as happened with one partner in September 2026 (see our corrections log).
- Non-affiliate services get equal treatment. 1984 Hosting, Shinjiru, Bitrefill and several other ranked services have no affiliate relationship with us. They are scored on the same data as everyone else.
- No sponsored placements, ever. No service can pay to appear on this site, to rank higher, or to remove a negative finding.
Why affiliate links instead of ads or paywalls
Testing 73 services cost us $4,180 in Q3 2026 alone — real purchases, real subscriptions, real swaps. Affiliate commissions are what let us keep buying test accounts without charging readers or plastering the site with display ads. It is the only funding model we have found that keeps the site free and the reviews independent at the same time.
Questions
Anything unclear about how we make money? Email [email protected] — we answer.