The short version

Right now, this site makes no money at all. No affiliate accounts are active, no placements are sold, no "partnerships" exist. Until that changes, every outbound link goes straight to the provider's website with zero tracking parameters.

What may change - and what we will do with it

Some outbound links may earn us a commission if we ever sign up for a program and you buy after you click. If that happens, the table on the payouts page shows the published commission per provider, the provider's money-trail box shows what a click would be worth to us, and every earning link gets rel="nofollow sponsored".

And what happens with the money: we plan to donate the majority of our profits to open-source and privacy projects - the infrastructure this site's advice depends on (Tor, WireGuard, Amnezia, the censored-web tooling). When we start paying out, the donation report goes on the change feed.

The technical guarantee

Rankings and scores are computed in src/score.js. That file (and the whole scoring path) contains no reference to the affiliate columns - and a test in our suite greps the source on every run to enforce it. Affiliate data lives in its own fields, used only for the public disclosure boxes. Rankings cannot be bought, not even by us.

What we refuse

• Paid placements, paid "awards", sponsored positions - no.
• Rankings that depend on commission - technically impossible, see above.
• Undisclosed links - every affiliate link is rel="nofollow sponsored" and labeled.

Providers with no affiliate program (Mullvad, IVPN) can and do outrank providers that would pay us. That is the point.