Disclosure — this page is the disclosure: exactly three companies currently pay us anything: Beehiiv, systeme.io and pCloud. Beehiiv runs our newsletter; systeme.io is the all-in-one platform we point solopreneurs to; we joined pCloud’s affiliate programme on 23 August 2026 — after the storage guide was already written and published, not before. Every other outbound tool link anywhere on this site is a plain link that earns us nothing today. This page lists all of it, including the tools we recommend that pay affiliates zero by policy, and the kinds of programs we decline. Our formal policy lives on the affiliate disclosure page.

How this site makes money

Who Pays Us (And Who Pays Us Nothing)

Every review site says it is honest. That claim is worth roughly nothing on its own, because there is no way for you to check it. So here is the version you can check: a public list of who pays us, who does not, and which programs we have turned down and why. If any recommendation on this site ever stops matching this page, we have a problem — and you can see it from here.

This page is deliberately boring. No hype, no numbers we cannot back up, no claims about how much we earn (very little, and that is not the point). Just the commercial map.

How affiliate links actually work

An affiliate link is a normal link with a tracking code attached. If you click it and later buy something, the company can see the sale came from us and pays us a slice of what you already paid them. That is the whole mechanism.

What it costs you: nothing. The price is identical to the price you would get by typing the company's address into your browser. The money comes out of the company's marketing budget — the budget that would otherwise go to ads. Occasionally an affiliate link carries a small discount, in which case it costs you less; it never costs you more.

So the risk to you is not financial. It is editorial. The real danger of affiliate income is that the writer's rankings quietly reorganise themselves around commission rates, and you cannot tell from the outside, because the incentive is invisible. Every "top pick" that happens to be the highest-paying program in its category is a coincidence you are asked to take on faith.

The only fix we know of is to make the incentive visible. That is this page.

1. The only three programs that currently earn us anything

Neither was chosen because of the commission; both were covered on merit before either earned us anything, which is the correct order and also the harder one to prove — so judge us on whether the reviews still contain the downsides. They do.

Two rules we hold ourselves to on all three: the commission never changes the ranking, and the downside paragraph never gets softened. If Beehiiv is the wrong tool for what you are doing — and for plenty of readers it is — the review says so before the button. Details in our Beehiiv page, our systeme.io review and our encrypted storage guide.

That is the complete list. Not "the main ones." The complete list. Every other tool link on this site — every VPN, password manager, ad blocker, cloud storage service, planner app, email platform, AI tool and course platform — is a plain, non-earning link today. We have no affiliate relationship with any of them, no pending payment, no negotiated rate. Where those links appear, the page says "we currently earn nothing from this link" right next to them.

We may join more programs later. If we do, see section 5 — you will be able to tell.

2. Tools we recommend that pay us nothing, by policy

These are not oversights. Each of these companies has made a deliberate decision not to run an affiliate program, or to run one that pays publishers zero — usually because paying for recommendations is exactly the thing their product positioning is against. Several of them are our default picks in their categories anyway.

Use this as a test on other sites, not just ours. A password manager roundup with no Bitwarden. A VPN comparison with no Mullvad and no IVPN. An ad-blocker guide that somehow never mentions uBlock Origin. None of those omissions have an innocent editorial explanation — the tools are too well known in their categories for a genuine reviewer to miss them. What they have in common is that they pay nothing. When the zero-commission options are missing, you are reading a list sorted by payout with the sorting hidden.

You can see this in practice in our own work: our password manager comparison leads with Bitwarden, and our ad blocker guide leads with uBlock Origin. Both are the non-earning picks.

3. The programs we decline

We go looking for programs, and we turn some of them down. We want to describe this as a category rather than an accusation list, because most of these judgements are about business models rather than about villains, and because a product can be badly sold without being badly built.

We decline a program when one or more of these is true:

• The product relies on scare-marketing funnels. Fake or exaggerated scan results, countdown timers on a security purchase, manufactured urgency about a threat you do not actually have. If the sales process is engineered to frighten someone into a subscription, our recommending it makes us part of that machine, whatever the software does afterwards.
• The pricing is discount-then-escalate. A cheap, heavily advertised first term that automatically renews at a much higher one, with the increase disclosed as quietly as the law allows. We are not against renewals — we are against a headline price that was never the real price. If we would be embarrassed to explain your year-two bill to the reader who trusted us in year one, we do not take the commission.
• The vendor's own published terms contradict each other. This one is unglamorous and it disqualifies more programs than you would think. If a company states its cookie window two different ways on two of its own pages, or publishes three incompatible commission structures, then we cannot describe how anything works without guessing — and we do not publish guesses as facts. Sloppy public terms are also a reasonable proxy for how the company will behave when there is a dispute.
• Big first-payment bounty, no share of renewals. Not disqualifying on its own, but it is the best junk filter we have found. A program that pays generously for a signup and nothing for a customer who stays is a program that has priced in churn. That tells you what the vendor expects the product to be worth in month thirteen.
• Our readers legally cannot buy it, or shouldn't. Some products are subject to government restrictions in markets where our readers live. Commission on a purchase we should not be steering someone toward is not income, it is a liability.

The specific one worth naming: the highest recurring commission rate we found anywhere in the VPN category — higher than any program we have joined or plan to join — came from a vendor whose own pages state its cookie window two different ways, whose marketing leans hard on permanent "lifetime deal" discounting, and whose historical no-logging claims did not survive contact with a public court record. That is PureVPN. We turned it down. It was the highest headline rate on our entire shortlist, and turning it down is the clearest evidence we can offer that the ordering on this site is not for sale. We reserve the right to keep writing critically about products we refuse to earn from — declining a commission is not a promise of silence.

The same reasoning removes several large consumer antivirus brands from consideration for us. We are not calling their software fake; some of it is fine. We are saying that the funnel it is sold through, and the renewal pattern behind it, are things we do not want to be paid to send you into.

4. What this means for a page you are reading

Practical version, so you do not have to take any of the above on trust:

1. Look at the disclosure box at the top of any article. It names which links on that specific page earn us anything. On most pages the answer is "none of them", and it says so.
2. Look at the small text under any button. Earning links say "affiliate link — we may earn a commission". Non-earning links say "plain link — we currently earn nothing from this". There is no third category and no unlabelled link.
3. Look for the "honest part" paragraph. Every tool we cover gets a real downside written into it, including the two that pay us. A recommendation with no stated trade-off is not a recommendation, it is an ad.
4. Check any price before you buy. We do not publish prices we have not verified, and pricing changes faster than articles do. Every page tells you to check the tool's own pricing page, because that is genuinely the only current source.

5. How you would find out if this changes

We expect this page to change. We intend to apply to more programs, and some of those applications will be approved. Here is the commitment:

• Same-day update. The day a link starts earning us money, this page and the affiliate disclosure page are updated, and the link is re-marked as sponsored in the page code with the label changed underneath it. The disclosure change ships with the link, not after it.
• No silent re-ranking. If a tool moves from the non-earning list to the earning list, its position in any comparison does not move with it, and its downside paragraph stays exactly as written. If our opinion of a tool genuinely changes, we will say what changed about the tool.
• The zero-commission tools stay. Bitwarden, Mullvad, uBlock Origin, Windscribe and IVPN keep their places regardless of what anyone else starts paying us. They are the control group.
• The refusals stay refusals. If we ever join a program from a category described in section 3, we will say plainly what we decided we had been wrong about. Silently reversing it is the failure mode this page exists to make visible.
• Ask us. If something on this site looks like it is ranked by payout, tell us and we will either fix it or explain the reasoning in public. The about page has the contact route.

Everything on this page describes our commercial arrangements as of the date of writing. Affiliate terms, program availability and pricing all change frequently — for any tool's current price, check the tool's own pricing page rather than any article, including ours.

FAQ

Do affiliate links cost me anything?

No. You pay the same price you would pay by typing the company's address into your browser yourself. The commission comes out of the company's marketing budget, not out of your bill. An affiliate link cannot make a product more expensive. The real cost of affiliate links is not to your wallet — it is the risk that the writer's ranking quietly follows the money, which is the whole reason this page exists.

Which companies actually pay The Daily Stack Guides?

Three, as of 23 August 2026: Beehiiv, which runs our newsletter; systeme.io, the all-in-one platform we recommend to solopreneurs; and pCloud, whose programme we joined on 23 August 2026 — four days after the storage guide that recommends it was published. Every other outbound tool link on this site is a plain, non-earning link — including the security, privacy, planner and productivity tools we recommend most often. We have no affiliate relationship with any of them today.

Why do you recommend tools that pay you nothing?

Because they are frequently the right answer. Bitwarden, Mullvad, uBlock Origin, Windscribe and IVPN all pay affiliates nothing by policy, and several are our default picks in their categories. Their absence from a "best of" list is a useful red flag: if a roundup of password managers has no Bitwarden, or a VPN roundup has no Mullvad, the most likely explanation is that the list is sorted by commission rather than by merit.

What kinds of affiliate programs do you turn down?

Three patterns. Products sold through scare-marketing funnels. Pricing built on discount-then-escalate renewals, where a cheap first year quietly becomes an expensive automatic second one. And programs whose own published terms contradict each other — if the cookie window is stated two different ways on two of the vendor's own pages, we cannot honestly tell you how anything works. We declined the highest-paying recurring commission we found in the VPN category for exactly these reasons.

What happens if you join a new affiliate program?

This page and our affiliate disclosure page get updated the same day the link goes live, and the link itself gets marked as sponsored in the page's code and labelled in plain English underneath it. We do not run an earning link without saying so, and we do not quietly re-rank an article because a company started paying us. If a tool moves from the non-earning list to the earning list, the honest downsides in its review stay exactly where they are.

Isn't a page like this just a trust-building tactic?

It is a tactic, yes — and it only works if it is true, which is the useful property. A list of who pays us is checkable against every other page on the site. If our top picks stop matching it, you will be able to see the mismatch without taking our word for anything. That is the difference between a claim of honesty and a claim you can test.

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Bottom line: three companies pay us — Beehiiv, systeme.io and pCloud — and all three are labelled everywhere they appear. Everything else you click here earns us nothing today, several of our favourite tools pay affiliates nothing on principle, and we turned down the biggest recurring commission in the VPN category because of how the product is sold. None of that makes us right about any particular tool. It just means that when we are wrong, it is an honest mistake rather than a paid one — and you can check.

Found something on this site that looks ranked by payout rather than merit? Tell us. That is a bug report, and we would rather have it than not.