Affiliate & Sponsorship Disclosure
Last updated: 2026-10-06
The short version
Some outbound links on Selfhostbase are affiliate links. If you follow one and buy something, the merchant may pay us a small commission. You pay the same price either way. A commission never determines what we recommend, how a tool is ranked, or whether it is listed at all.
How affiliate links work here
An affiliate link carries a tracking parameter that tells the merchant the visit came from this site. If a purchase follows, the merchant pays us a percentage of the sale. That tracking is handled by the merchant or their affiliate network, not by us — we do not receive your name, address, payment details, or an itemised record of what you bought. What we see is aggregate commission totals. The privacy policy covers what those third parties may store in your browser.
What we will not do
Three commitments, so you can hold us to them:
- We will not recommend a tool because it pays commission. Tools are listed and ranked on the same criteria whether or not any money is involved: whether the project is real, whether it is still maintained, and whether it is genuinely a good fit for the job.
- We will not hide that a link is an affiliate link. Affiliate links carry
rel="sponsored", the standard machine-readable signal, and this page states the policy in plain language. - We will not let payment soften a verdict. Where the paid option is worse, we say so — including when the tool in question is one we earn from.
Sponsored placements
A vendor can pay for a sponsored placement, which affects where their listing appears on a page. It does not affect whether they are included, and a sponsored placement is labelled as one. If we ever publish a sponsored review, it will be marked clearly at the top of the page and will still state the tool's real weaknesses — a review with no criticism in it is not a review.
Advertising
Pages may also carry display advertising served by a third party. Display advertising is separate from editorial content and from affiliate links; the privacy policy describes what those services may store in your browser and how to turn it off.
Questions
If you want to know whether a specific link is an affiliate link, or you think one has gone undisclosed, use the contact page. We would rather correct it than argue about it.