Affiliate Disclosure

Full disclosure

This site participates in affiliate programs with several VPN providers, including but not limited to NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Proton VPN, and CyberGhost. When you click a link from our articles to one of these providers and subscribe to their service, we may earn a commission.

You pay exactly the same price. The commission comes out of the provider’s marketing budget, not your pocket. In many cases, our links also include a discount that you wouldn’t get by going directly to the provider’s homepage.

Why this matters to you as a reader

You deserve to know when a site has a financial interest in you taking an action. That’s the reason this page exists, and it’s why we include a visible disclosure box at the top of every article that contains affiliate links.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires this disclosure on US-based sites, and we follow the requirements in full: clear, conspicuous, and placed where you’ll see it before you click.

How we stay honest despite being paid

The business model only works if our recommendations are trustworthy. If we ranked products by commission rate instead of quality, readers would stop coming back, and the commissions would stop. So our incentives actually align with yours more than you might expect.

Concretely:

• We’ve declined sponsorship offers that would have required positive coverage.
• When a VPN we’ve recommended in the past declines in quality (slower speeds, broken features, pricing changes for the worse), we update or remove the recommendation even when it costs us commissions.
• When a lower-commission product is better for a specific use case, that’s what we recommend.

How to tell which links are affiliate

All affiliate links on this site use the rel="sponsored" HTML attribute. Most browsers and screen readers can identify these. The box at the top of every commercial article explicitly states that the article contains affiliate links.

If you ever want to make sure we don’t earn a commission on your purchase, you can type the VPN provider’s URL directly into your browser. We’d rather have your trust than your click.

Questions

If you have any questions about how we make money or how we stay impartial, email us at [email protected]. Transparency is the whole point of this page.