How StackForGood Makes Money

StackForGood makes money two ways, and this is the whole list. We earn a referral commission when you buy a tool we recommend through one of our links, at no extra cost to you. And we are building a small set of paid services around our free Discount Finder. There is no hidden third lane, no paid placements, and no sale of your data.

We independently review everything we recommend, and we may earn a commission.

Status, July 2026: no affiliate partnership is active yet. Today every vendor link on this site is a plain link that earns us nothing. This page describes the model we are building; when a partnership goes live, this page and the disclosure beside each affected link will say so, and our partners page lists every active relationship (currently: none).

We tell you that plainly because the entire value of an advisor is that you can trust the advice, so the rest of this page is how we keep that commission from ever bending what we tell you.

How the affiliate part works

When we recommend a tool and you follow our link to buy it, the vendor pays us a referral fee. You pay the normal price, exactly what you would pay going direct, and the fee comes out of the vendor's side, not yours. That is the same arrangement behind most product-review sites you have ever read.

The difference is what sits next to the link. Wherever we carry an affiliate link, we say so right there, in plain words, not buried in a footer or a disclosures page you have to go hunting for. If we may earn something when you click, you will know before you click.

The one rule: the money never picks the winner

Here is the rule the whole site runs on. The commission never decides the recommendation. We pick the tool that actually fits your situation, and when the best answer is a free tool, a donated nonprofit plan, or simply doing nothing yet, that is what we tell you, even though those answers pay us nothing.

You will see this throughout our guides. We point small orgs at the roughly eighty-dollar-a-year donated software instead of the product that pays us a commission, when that is the right call. We tell readers who are not ready for a paid tool to claim a free tier and come back later. An advisor who only ever says buy is just a salesperson with a blog. We would rather send you to the free option and keep your trust.

Where we earn nothing

Some categories have no honest affiliate fit at all, and we cover them anyway. Our case management guide and our AI tools pages route you to the right answer without earning us a cent, because the tools that fit a small org there either pay nothing or run no program we would join. We say so directly on those pages.

What we will never do

A few promises that are easier to keep when they are written down:

We will never take payment to rank one tool above a better one. Placement is editorial, never bought.
We will never publish a fake or AI-generated review dressed up as hands-on testing. If we have not formed a genuine view, we will not pretend we have.
We will never invent testimonials, client names, or logos to look bigger than we are.
We will never sell, rent, or trade your data. The Finder asks what it needs to help you and nothing more.

If we ever break one of these, the trust is gone and so is the reason anyone would read us. That is a strong incentive to keep them.

Why we do it this way

The honest version of this business is simple. The trust is the asset. A recommendation you believe is worth something, to you and to us, and a recommendation you suspect was bought is worth nothing to anyone. So we would rather lose a sale than lose your trust, and we built the whole model around being able to tell you not to buy.