Affiliate disclosure

This desk is funded, indirectly, by the platforms it writes about. Follow one of the four outbound vendor links, start a plan at the other end, and that vendor may pay us for the introduction. Your price does not move as a result — the rate you see is the rate you would have been shown arriving on your own.

Which links these are

Every outbound link to a platform on this site goes through a path beginning /go/, and every one of them is marked with rel="sponsored nofollow" in the page source. Search engines are instructed not to follow them, and our robots file excludes the whole path.

Links to vendor documentation, help centres and pricing pages are plain links that earn nothing. They are there so you can hold a figure on this site against the page it came from, which is the only reason to publish a source at all.

Why it does not change the ratings

Three structural reasons, all of which you can verify rather than take on trust.

The rating method is published. How we judge sets out the four criteria and what each score band means. A rating that had been adjusted for commercial reasons would have to be defended against a published method, in public.

Every platform covered carries the same kind of link. The lowest-rated platform on this site has one. The highest has one. There is no vendor here we are paid to promote and no vendor we are not, so a commission cannot explain why one ranks above another.

The most valuable pages here reduce conversions. A site optimised for commission would not lead with the fact that none of these platforms documents an application export, would not tell you the free tiers prove nothing, and would not spend a page explaining why nobody can quote you a monthly cost. Those pages exist because they are true and useful, and they demonstrably cost us clicks.

What we will not do

We will not publish a rating we do not hold, recommend a platform we would not use for the job described, or omit a limitation because it is commercially inconvenient. We will not paste a tracking URL into an article; every paid destination lives in one configuration file and nowhere else, which is a technical arrangement made for an editorial reason.

We will not accept payment for a review, for a position in a ranking, or for the removal of a criticism.

Current status

As this page is written, all four outbound links resolve to plain vendor home pages. When a programme goes live the destination in one configuration file changes and nothing else in the tree moves — not a sentence, not a position in the grid, not a score.

Questions about any of this are welcome at the contact page.