We don't sell what we review

Why this is not a small detail

Most VPN “reviews” are paid placement. The reviewer earns a commission on every sign-up it sends, so the incentive is to rank whatever pays best and call it first. Sometimes the conflict is not even at arm's length, the same company owns the VPN and the site that reviews it.

One case sits inside this very corpus. ExpressVPN is owned by Kape Technologies, and Kape also owns Webselenese, which, by Kape's own description, runs a portfolio of consumer privacy comparison sites that publish “unbiased” reviews and guides. So a reader comparing VPNs on one of those sites can be reading a buyer's guide published by the seller, about the seller and its rivals. Nothing here suggests that arrangement is hidden or illegal; Kape lists both brands on its own site. It is simply a structural conflict, and one this site does not have and cannot have: we own no VPN, and no VPN owns us.

That is the whole of what we can show you. Other providers and other review brands are named across the industry in the same breath, but they are not in our five-provider corpus and carry no citation here, so we do not assert them. A claim is only worth what you can check, and this is what we can.

It is also why we can score a conflict of interest at all

Independence is not just a promise on an about page, it is a thing our engine can measure. One of the scored transparency rules asks whether a provider's parent company also owns consumer VPN comparison sites. When it does, the provider is marked down for it, because a reviewer that reviews itself is a trust problem for anyone relying on those reviews. A site that took affiliate money could not apply that rule with a straight face; it would be scoring its own paymasters. We can, because we take none.

You can see the rule fire in the corpus and follow it to the evidence behind it, like every other score on the site, start from the reviews or read how the rule is weighted in the methodology.

We don't cite the affiliate sites

Our evidence rules forbid it. A claim on this site has to trace to a primary source, a privacy policy, an audit report, a court filing, source code, a measurement we ran ourselves. A competitor review site is none of those; it is a secondary source with a commercial stake in the answer, and citing it would launder its ranking into ours. So the citations you see here point at documents, not at other people's verdicts.

How to hold us to it

A claim of independence is only worth what you can check. Ours is checkable: the whole corpus is downloadable and the formula is written down, so every ranking can be re-derived without taking our word for anything. If this ever stops being true, if any commercial relationship with a provider appears, the independence claim comes down before anything else changes.