Follow the money
Affiliate disclosure
A review site that takes commissions has an obvious conflict of interest. We're not going to pretend it doesn't exist. Here's exactly how we get paid, and exactly what that payment can't buy.
The short version
How we make money
When a tool earns a verdict good enough that we'd point you at it, some of those links are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the vendor pays us a commission. It costs you nothing extra. The price is the same whether you go through us or type the URL in yourself.
That's the whole business model: commissions on tools we already decided were worth recommending. It keeps the site free and keeps us from running ads for things we'd never tell you to buy.
No vendor pays to be reviewed. Nobody buys their way onto the bench, up the rankings, or out of a bad verdict. We pick what to test; they don't.
What it doesn't buy
The commission is the reward for sending you somewhere good. It is never the reason a tool looks good. A cheque has never bought, and will never buy:
- A higher score. The Dread Score comes off the test rig, not the contract.
- A badge. Certified is earned on the bench or not at all.
- A softer verdict. We don't round a tool up because it pays us.
- Silence. We publish SLOP verdicts on tools we have an affiliate deal with, and leave the link right there so you can watch us do it.
That last one is the proof. The easiest way to make more money would be to bury every bad review of a tool that pays us. We don't. If the tool is slop, the verdict says slop, and the affiliate link still sits underneath it, because the verdict is the product, and the day we fake it the whole site is worthless.
How to spot an affiliate link
You shouldn't have to guess. Every affiliate link on this site is labelled twice. Once for you, once for the machines:
A disclosure box on the review
Any review with an affiliate link carries the same disclosure you read at the top of this page, right next to the button. No fine print, no footer-only mention.
The
rel="sponsored nofollow"tagEvery outbound affiliate link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML. That's the honest signal to search engines that we may be compensated, and you can confirm it yourself by viewing source.
FTC compliance
The US Federal Trade Commission requires that any material connection between a reviewer and a product, like an affiliate commission, be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the recommendation, in plain language a normal person actually notices.
We meet that bar and then some: a disclosure on every affiliate review, this standalone page, and machine-readable rel="sponsored nofollow" tags on the links themselves. Honestly, the disclosure isn't a compliance chore for us. It's the entire pitch.
Questions
Think a verdict looks bought? Spotted an affiliate link we forgot to label? Tell us. We'd rather you check our work than take it on faith. That's the point of publishing all of this in the first place. Reach us at hello@dreadrobot.com.
Where the scores come from
Now you know money doesn't move the needle. Here's what actually does. The exact rig, leads, and maths behind every Dread Score.