Short version: some links on this site earn us a commission, it never costs you more, and it does not decide what we recommend.
What we earn from
Many of the AI tools we write about run affiliate programs, most of them paying a share of the subscription for as long as you stay a customer. When we link to a tool from a review or roundup, that link may be an affiliate link. If you buy through it, the vendor pays us and you pay the same price you would have paid anyway.
Display advertising may also appear on the guide hubs, and the weekly email may eventually carry a clearly marked sponsor. Neither advertisers nor sponsors see articles before they publish or have any say in what we cover.
Why this is worth being blunt about
Recurring commissions create an obvious incentive: recommend the expensive subscription, never mention the free alternative, and certainly never suggest running something locally for the price of electricity. That incentive points directly against the most useful advice we have.
So the rule we hold ourselves to: the recommendation is made first and the link is added afterwards, never the other way round. Where a free or self-hosted option is genuinely the better answer — which, for local models, it often is — that is what the article says, and we earn nothing from it. Several of the guides on this site exist specifically to talk you out of a subscription.
What would make us drop a program
If a vendor ties commission to review language, pressures us over a critical piece, or ships something that puts customer data somewhere it should not be, we leave the program and say why in the journal.
Our own service
We also sell something directly: on-premise AI installation for small offices. That is a bigger conflict of interest than any affiliate link, so it is worth naming. The guides in the Local & Private AI hub are written so that a competent person can do the whole thing themselves without hiring us, and they include the cases where you should not bother doing it at all.