Who pays us, who does not, and what that changes

The arrangement, plainly

Some outbound links on this site are partner links. If you follow one and later become a paying customer, the vendor's programme may pay this site a share of what you spend, at no change to your price. Every one of those links goes through an address on this domain that begins /go/, and every one carries rel="sponsored nofollow" so that search engines are told what it is. Links that are not partner links are ordinary links and are not dressed up as anything else.

Nothing on this page is a promotion. There are no discount codes on this site and there never will be: several of the programmes below prohibit coupon placement outright, and the rest would still be a poor reason to trust a comparison.

The CRMs that can pay us

These are the vendors with a partner programme this site has read the terms of. Several are applications rather than open sign-ups, which means no money has changed hands and may never.

• HubSpot — open programme, pays on paid plans only.
• Pipedrive, monday CRM, Freshsales, Attio, folk — application-only. Until each is approved for this domain, the link simply goes to the vendor's front page and pays nothing.
• Zoho CRM, ActiveCampaign, Capsule, EngageBay, Insightly — open programmes.

Until a programme issues this site its own tracking link, /go/ sends you to the vendor's ordinary home page. That is true of every link here today. The site is written so that it reads correctly whether that ever changes or not.

The links that pay nothing, and why they are here anyway

• Salesforce runs no publisher programme at all. There is nothing to join. That means the whole of the Salesforce alternatives page — the busiest kind of page this site has — is written for nothing, and every mention of Salesforce anywhere here is a plain link.
• HubSpot's free tools pay nothing. HubSpot pays on paid plans, so when this site says a one- or two-person team with a short list should stay on the free tier and not move at all, it is recommending the outcome that earns it least. It says so anyway, because it is often right.
• Every vendor named in passing without a link — Marketo, Close, Bigin and the rest — is named because the sentence needed them, not because anything is owed.

What a commission does not buy

It does not buy a place in a table, an order in a list, a score, or a sentence. The move score on this site is arithmetic over six published facts, printed in full on the about page so that anyone can re-derive it; it has no input for what a vendor pays, and there is nowhere to put one. Two of the three scored moves on this site are scored down on facts their vendors would rather not lead with.

If a partner programme ever asked for a change to a figure or a ranking here, the answer would be no and the request would go on this page.

Independence, stated once

No vendor has seen a page on this site before it was published, no vendor has been sent one for approval, and no vendor has been paid for anything here. Every figure comes from the vendor's own public pages and is dated. That is the whole arrangement.