Advertiser disclosure

Publishing costs money and this site is free to read, so it is funded commercially. You are entitled to know exactly how, because that is the only way to judge whether what you read here is worth trusting.

How we are funded

Affiliate commissions. Some links to software vendors are affiliate links. If you follow one and sign up, we may receive a commission from the vendor. It costs you nothing — the price you pay is the same as it would be going direct, and in some cases better where a programme includes a reader discount.

Display advertising. Some pages carry advertising served by third-party networks. These are bought programmatically against general audiences, not sold by us to specific software companies as a way onto a page.

That is the whole list. We do not take payment for reviews, we do not sell placements in shortlists, and we do not publish sponsored articles.

What money cannot buy here

This is the part that matters, so it is stated as flatly as we can:

• Placement. No company can pay to be included in a shortlist, comparison or category page. Products are included because they are relevant to the reader.
• Position. No company can pay to be ranked higher, listed first, or described as a winner.
• Verdicts. No company can pay for a criticism to be removed, a limitation to go unmentioned, or a recommendation to be softened.
• Editorial links. We do not sell links inside articles, and we decline every "link insertion", "guest post" and "content partnership" offer we receive. There are many of them.
• Removal. No company can pay to have a page about them taken down or rewritten.

If a vendor makes any of these a condition of an affiliate relationship, we do not take the relationship.

Where commercial links appear, and how they are marked

Pages that may contain affiliate links carry a disclosure at the top of the page, above the content, not buried at the bottom.

Affiliate links are marked at the HTML level with rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the standard Google asks publishers to use so that search engines can tell a commercial link from an editorial one. Ordinary references to a vendor's site — documentation, pricing pages, security whitepapers we cite as sources — are plain external links, and we cite those constantly whether or not any commercial relationship exists.

Advertising units are labelled "Advertisement". You should never have to guess whether something is an ad, and no ad on this site is styled to look like editorial content or like a download or "start" button.

Why we use affiliate links at all

The honest answer is that the alternatives are worse for readers. A paywall would put buying advice behind a payment. Selling sponsored placements would corrupt the recommendations themselves. Filling pages with heavy advertising would make the site unpleasant and push us toward volume over quality.

Affiliate commissions are paid after someone decides to buy something they were already looking for. The failure mode — steering readers toward whatever pays most — is real, and the way to manage it is the rule above: commercial relationships never determine inclusion, order or verdict, and we publish plenty of pages that recommend products we earn nothing from.

How this affects what we cover

It does have one effect worth naming: categories where software is sold on subscription tend to have affiliate programmes, and categories where good options are free or open source often do not. Left unmanaged, that biases coverage toward paid products.

We manage it by covering free and open-source options as first-class choices, and by saying when a free tool is the right answer. If a spreadsheet, a built-in operating system feature or a free tier genuinely solves the problem, that is what the page says, even though it earns nothing.

Prices and offers

Prices mentioned on this site are the vendor's published prices at the date shown on the page. They change without notice, promotional pricing expires, and regional pricing varies. Always confirm the current price on the vendor's own site before you buy. We do not display live pricing and we do not claim to.

Our relationships

We do not currently hold equity in, receive funding from, or operate on behalf of any software vendor we cover. If that changes, the specific relationship will be disclosed on this page and on every affected article before publication.

Questions

If you think a page reads like it was influenced by a commercial relationship, tell us at partners@softwarespick.com. That is a serious complaint and we treat it as one.

Related reading: our editorial policy covers the standards behind the writing itself, and our correction policy covers what happens when we get something wrong.