How We Make Money
We built comparesubscriptions.com to answer one nagging question as honestly as we can: is this subscription actually worth your money? Streaming, VPNs, music, software, cloud storage, fitness apps, gaming — there are more monthly charges competing for your wallet than ever, and most "reviews" online are thin wrappers around whatever pays the most. We wanted to do the opposite. This page explains exactly how we keep the lights on, and the firm line we draw between earning a living and earning your trust.
The short version: we are reader-supported through affiliate commissions, and those commissions never touch our scores or our picks. If you only read one sentence, read that one.
We're reader-supported
We don't charge you anything. There's no paywall, no subscription to read about subscriptions, and we don't sell your data. Instead, when you click a link on our site and sign up for a service, the company sometimes pays us a commission. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same as if you'd found the service on your own.
That's the entire business model. It's the same way a lot of independent review sites stay free, and we think it's a fair trade: you get research we've spent real hours on, and if it helps you pick something, we earn a little for pointing you there. When the model works, it lets us stay independent — no single advertiser, no sponsor, no investor gets to lean on what we publish.
The wall between money and scores
Here's the part that matters most, so we want to be precise about it.
Every service we cover gets an Experience Index — our proprietary score for how good the actual experience is. That number is not something an editor types in based on a gut feeling, and it is absolutely not something a sales conversation can move. The Experience Index is computed by a deterministic engine from logged evidence: the sources, tests, and observations we record while reviewing a service. Same inputs, same score, every time.
The engine that produces the score has no knowledge of our affiliate relationships. It cannot see which companies pay us, how much they pay, or whether they pay at all. That information simply isn't part of what it reads. So there is no lever — technical or human — by which a commission could nudge a rating up or down. The money lives entirely on one side of the wall; the scoring lives entirely on the other.
This is a deliberate design choice, not a promise we're asking you to take on faith. By separating how we earn from how we score, we remove the temptation to cheat before it can start.
What this means in practice
- A service that pays us a generous commission can still score poorly, and we'll say so plainly.
- A service that pays us nothing can top its category — and several do.
- When we change a score, it's because the logged evidence changed, not because a partnership did.
The kinds of programs we use
To be transparent about the mechanics, here are the sorts of affiliate arrangements we participate in:
- Amazon Associates — for services and hardware available through Amazon.
- Affiliate networks like Impact and CJ (Commission Junction) — these are intermediaries that connect publishers like us with brands' affiliate programs.
- Direct or in-house programs that some subscription companies run themselves.
The specific brands and rates change over time, and we don't list them service-by-service because, again, our scoring engine never sees them anyway. What stays constant is the structure: we get paid for referrals, never for ratings.
How we disclose affiliate links
We follow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's guidance on disclosing material connections. In plain terms: when a link can earn us a commission, we tell you, clearly and near the link itself — not buried in fine print you'd need a magnifying glass to find. If you see a "we may earn a commission" note or a tagged outbound link, that's us being upfront. You should never have to wonder whether a link pays us. Assume that most outbound links to a service's sign-up page are affiliate links unless we say otherwise, and know that it changes nothing about how that service was scored.
Services with no affiliate program
Not every company runs an affiliate program, and that's perfectly fine by us. Netflix, for example, doesn't offer one — we earn nothing if you subscribe to it. We review it anyway, on exactly the same terms, with exactly the same Experience Index, using exactly the same logged evidence as everything else.
We mention this because it's the cleanest proof of how the wall works. If commissions secretly drove our coverage, the services that pay us nothing would quietly disappear or get punished with low scores. They don't. A no-commission service can — and sometimes does — beat a paying one outright. The reader's experience is the only thing the score is built to measure.
How you can support us
If our work helped you, the simplest way to support the site is to use our links when you decide to sign up for something. It costs you nothing extra, and it tells us which research is actually useful so we can do more of it. You're never obligated to — and if you'd rather go straight to a service yourself, that's completely fine. We'd rather you make the right call than feel pushed into a click. A bookmark, a share with a friend who's drowning in subscriptions, or just coming back next time you're weighing a new sign-up all help more than you'd think.
Want to see how the scoring actually works?
If you're curious about what goes into the Experience Index — the evidence we log, how the deterministic engine turns it into a number, and how we keep it consistent across every category — that's all documented in detail.
Read our methodology page for the full picture.