Legal & policy

Affiliate Disclosure

This page explains, in plain language, how affiliate links work on The Daily Stack Guides, how we decide what to recommend, and exactly which programs we're part of. It's written to comply with FTC guidelines on endorsements and disclosures (16 CFR Part 255).

What an affiliate link is

Some links on this site are affiliate links. That means if you click through and sign up for, or buy, a product or service, we may earn a commission from the company behind it. This is how a lot of independent sites and newsletters cover their costs without charging readers directly or running intrusive ads.

It never costs you more

Affiliate commissions are paid by the company we're referring you to, out of their own marketing budget — not added on top of your price. In most cases the price you pay through our link is identical to the price you'd pay going direct, and occasionally our link carries a reader-only discount or extended trial on top. We'll always say so when that's the case.

How we decide what to recommend

We only link to tools we've genuinely researched, tested, or actively use ourselves. Being an affiliate partner is never the reason a tool gets recommended in the first place — we write the honest version of the page (including the parts where a tool falls short or isn't the right fit for someone) and only add an affiliate link where one is available for something we already believed in. If a tool isn't a good fit for a reader's situation, our pages say so, even when a "yes" would have paid better.

Programs we're currently in

This list reflects programs we intend to run affiliate links for as our guides go live for each tool. A program listed here as "rolling out" does not yet have a live commission-earning link on the site — check the specific guide's own disclosure box for its current, accurate status.

How disclosure appears on each page

Any page that contains an affiliate link carries a disclosure box near the top of the article, before the first affiliate link appears — not hidden in a footer you'd have to scroll past everything to find. Affiliate links themselves are also marked rel="sponsored" in the page's code, which is the technical signal search engines use to recognize paid/affiliate links.

Every page on this site also carries a short, generic reminder of this policy in the footer, whether or not that specific page contains an affiliate link.

Questions

If anything on a specific guide is unclear about whether a link is an affiliate link, treat the disclosure box on that page as the source of truth for that page. This document describes our general policy across the site.