How we make money

Some links on this site pay us a commission when someone opens an account. That is the business model, and it creates an obvious incentive to tell you things that are not true. Here is what we do about it.

The arrangement

When we link to a bank or a financial product, that link may earn us a fee if you open an account. It costs you nothing and does not change the terms you are offered. Links of that kind are marked, and technically tagged as sponsored so that search engines treat them correctly.

We are paid for the introduction, not for what happens next. Nobody pays us for a favourable write-up, and no partner sees a page before it is published or has any right to change one.

What the commission never changes

• We do not feature anything we would not recommend identically without the commission. If the honest verdict on a paying partner is that most people should choose something else, the page says that.
• Every comparison carries a “who this is bad for” line, partners included. No exceptions, and no softer wording for the ones that pay.
• No calculator's output is tuned to point at a product. The arithmetic runs the same regardless of what we would earn from it. Where a product genuinely improves your position we show you by exactly how much, in dollars; where the thing that would help is not something anyone can sell you, we say that instead of reaching for the nearest link.
• Ranking is never sold. Position on a comparison page is a function of the criteria stated on that page.

The bar for recommending anything

Nothing is recommended here, affiliate or not, unless it survives the arithmetic in public first. That is a higher bar than it sounds: it rules out the entire category of products whose case depends on a claim that cannot be checked.

We do not promise to never cover a category. Promising “never” is easy, sounds principled, and tells you nothing about the next thing we publish. The commitment we can keep is the one above — everything gets priced before it gets recommended, and the pricing is shown to you. As of today, nothing in the trading-bot or signal-service category has cleared that bar.

Where we are right now

In the interest of the same transparency: this site is new, and most affiliate arrangements are not yet in place. Where a page has no partner link, that is why. We would rather ship a page with no link on it than a link we have not earned the right to place.

What else pays for this

Advertising revenue from the video work on The Escape Fund funds part of the research. The channel and this site share their arithmetic and their standards; neither is paid to say anything about the other.