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How VPN Clue makes money

By VPN Clue Editorial Team Published Last verified

Affiliate commissions

Some links on VPN Clue are affiliate links. When you click one and buy a subscription, the provider pays us a commission. You pay the same price as you would by going to the provider directly. The money comes out of the provider’s marketing budget.

Every affiliate link on this site:

  • goes through an address that starts with /go/
  • carries the sponsored attribute that search engines require
  • sits below a visible disclosure on every page that contains one

We have affiliate relationships with NordVPN, Surfshark, Proton VPN and ExpressVPN. Where we have no relationship, the link simply goes to the provider’s website. Mullvad and IVPN do not run affiliate programs at all. We review, score and recommend them on exactly the same terms as everyone else.

The rules that keep money away from rankings

  • Scores are calculated from the published methodology. Whether a provider pays us is not an input, and nobody can edit a score by hand.
  • Best-of lists are ordered by the calculated criteria for that use case. Each pick shows the data that put it there.
  • We publish drawbacks and “not for” lists on every review, including for providers that pay the highest commissions.
  • We read prices and deals from official pages and show them with the date we checked them. We do not list expired coupons or invented discounts.
  • Affiliate programs do not get to see or approve content before publication. We do not run sponsored posts.

What we do not do

We do not sell rankings or placements. We do not run display advertising yet. If we add it later, it will be below the fold and labeled. We do not collect or sell reader data. Our tools store nothing you enter and nothing they measure.

Why we disclose this way

Regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom require clear disclosure of paid links. We think readers deserve it regardless. The disclosure appears in plain language above the first affiliate link on each page, rather than buried in a footer.

Changelog

  • Page published.