Affiliate disclosure

Where the paid links are

We have two affiliate partners. The first is Fanvue. Its sign-up links appear in guides and articles where Fanvue is the topic, on the Fanvue platform page and in the payout calculator.

The second is Shift Proxies, a proxy provider. We name it where a proxy really helps someone who runs social accounts: in our article on proxies for Instagram accounts, in a few articles about logins and checking your own pages from another country, and on the tools page. Until our affiliate link with Shift Proxies is set up, we name it there without a link. When the link arrives, those pages get the same notice and marker as every other affiliate link. We never recommend a proxy or a VPN for logging in to Fanvue.

Every page with an affiliate link has a notice at the top, above the first link, and every link is marked “affiliate”. Article cards that lead to such a page say “Affiliate links” too. Our tool reviews have no affiliate links.

We place it there on purpose. German competition law (§ 5a(4) UWG) says you must be able to recognise the commercial purpose while you are deciding. A notice you only see after you click does not do that. The notice is in English because the site is in English. Where we address a German audience specifically, it appears in German too. This describes what we do. It is not legal advice.

The US Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides set the same standard: a material connection such as a commission has to be disclosed clearly and close to the recommendation. That is why we also mark each affiliate link where it appears, and not only in the notice at the top.

What a commission gets a company

• A tracked link, on a page about a tool we have used ourselves.
• We keep mentioning the tool as long as it is the right choice for some readers, and we say who those readers are.

What a commission never gets a company

• A better verdict. Every tool page has a section on who the tool is wrong for. That section is not negotiable, and we do not soften it for a partner.
• A position in a comparison. The order follows what we think is true. It does not follow what pays.
• Removal of a documented failure. If a tool broke one of our workflows, that stays on the page, with the version number and the date.
• Exclusivity. When a tool without an affiliate link is the better choice, it gets the recommendation and the link. The affiliate tool is named as the alternative.
• A sponsored article, a paid review, a paid mention in the Discord, or any say in what we write. None of those are for sale, at any price.
• A review of a product nobody here has used. We do not write about a tool from its own marketing page.

What we do not take money for at all

Some products we do not link to at any price. No commission gets a link here for:

• Anything built to remove or rewrite provenance metadata: C2PA manifests, watermarks, generator tags. Platforms read these markers to tell people that content is AI. A tool built to remove them helps hide that. It can also make its users break the terms of the generator the files came from.
• Anything made to generate likenesses of real people without documented consent. That includes celebrity models and face datasets of unclear origin.
• Anything whose marketing plays on a youthful look. In Germany, § 184b StGB covers sexual depictions of children, including realistic AI-generated ones. We never link to that, at any commission rate.

How the site earns money

Affiliate commissions are our source of income: today the Fanvue links on this siteand staff links in the Discord. A recommendation in the Discord that can earn a commission says so in the message itself. Joining the server, reading it and everything on this site are free. There is no sponsorship of any kind and no display advertising.

None of this changes one thing: a commission never buys a verdict. Every tool page says who the tool is wrong for, in the same size of type as who it is right for. We write that section before we add the affiliate link. A recommendation that never says "not for you" is an advert, and this niche is full of them. Check for that first. It tells you more than asking whether money was paid, because somewhere it always is.

If a partnership changes

Affiliate partnerships start and end. The notice on each article is built from that article's own data. Nobody pastes it in by hand. When an article no longer has a commercial relationship, the notice goes away and the article's update date changes.