How this site is paid, and what that does not buy
RankReady earns commission when a reader signs up to a builder through a partner link. Here is exactly how that works, what it changes, and the specific safeguards that stop it changing a score.
RankReady is funded by commission. Sign up to a builder after arriving there from one of the seven vendor links on this site, and the vendor pays this desk a referral fee out of its own marketing budget. Your invoice is identical whether you arrive via a link here or type the address yourself.
Those seven links are the only commercial mechanism operating anywhere on the site. Each one leaves through a /go/ path, each carries rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup so that a machine reading the page is told what it is, and each is named in the paragraph that precedes it. There is no display advertising, no sponsored content, no paid placement and nothing disguised as editorial.
What the money pays for
Checking. Every capability claim here was read at source — vendor help centres, developer documentation, product pages — and those readings have to be redone as the products change. That is the recurring cost this site has, and the commission covers it.
What it does not buy
It does not buy a score. The scoring reasoning is written out in public on the control audit so that a reader can check whether the ordering follows from the evidence. If a scored platform moved because of a commercial relationship, the argument on the page would visibly stop making sense.
It does not buy placement. Position in the table follows the capability assessment, and the two platforms scoring highest are not the ones with the most generous programmes.
It does not buy a link at all. Several vendors mentioned across this site have no partner link anywhere on it, because the page they are mentioned on does not call for a recommendation.
It does not buy silence. Every platform linked here is also criticised here, by name, in the same paragraph in several cases.
The specific safeguards
Three, and they are structural rather than promises.
The links live in one file. Every partner destination is defined in a single configuration file and referenced by name in the copy. No writer chooses a URL while writing, which removes the moment where a decision about money could be made inside a sentence about a product.
The scoring reasoning is published. Not just the scores — the weighting, and why each capability was weighted that way. A rigged ranking survives publication of the numbers; it does not survive publication of the method.
Criticism is mandatory. Every platform audit on this site carries a locked by the platform column, and it is never empty. A page that cannot name what a product will not let you do has not audited it.
Programme status
At the time of writing, the outbound links on this site point at vendors' own public pages while programme applications are in progress. When a programme is approved, the destination in that one configuration file changes and nothing else about the site does — no sentence is rewritten, no score is revisited.
If you would rather not pass a commission this way, going to the vendor directly costs you nothing and costs this site nothing you are obliged to care about. The audits are the product; the links are how they get paid for. Questions about any of this go to the desk.