Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure
We'd rather you hear this from us than figure it out from a URL: this site earns money. Here's exactly how, in plain English.
What affiliate links are
Some links on this site — especially in our VPN buying guides — are affiliate links. That means if you click one and sign up for a service, the company pays us a commission (typically a one-time payout per signup) at no extra cost to you. These programs are usually run through affiliate networks such as Impact.com, CJ Affiliate, or ShareASale, or directly by the VPN companies themselves.
To be concrete: if our travel guide links to a VPN provider and you buy a two-year plan through that link, we may earn a commission from that sale. The price you pay is the same as going direct.
What this means for our recommendations
Commissions never determine our rankings. Our buying guides publish their evaluation criteria — audited no-logs policies, jurisdiction, kill switches, modern protocols — and providers are scored against those criteria whether or not they pay us. We regularly recommend limited free tiers that earn us nothing, and we publish articles (like our decision guide) whose entire point is talking some readers out of buying.
We also name the limits of every product category we cover. Trust is the business model here: a reader who learns when not to buy becomes the reader who trusts the recommendation when they do.
Display ads
You may see display advertisements on some pages, served through an ad network (currently planned: Mediavine Journey). These ads are selected by the network, not by us, and we don't endorse the products advertised. If an ad ever contradicts our editorial content, the content wins — tell us and we'll look into it.
Sponsorships and digital products
We occasionally accept sponsorships from privacy-focused companies (password managers, encrypted email services) and sell our own digital products, such as privacy setup checklists. We only work with products we would review honestly, and every sponsored placement is labeled as sponsored. Nothing on this site is a paid review disguised as editorial.
Contact
Questions about any of this — a link you think is mislabeled, a recommendation you want to challenge, a correction to our criteria? We want to hear it. Email us at hello@privacyplainenglish.com and a human on the Privacy Plain English team will reply.