Affiliate disclosure

Last updated: 11 May 2026

What affiliate links are

An affiliate link is a regular link with a tracking code attached. If you click one and then sign up to the linked service, the service pays Toolhub a small referral commission. The price you pay is identical to the non-affiliate version — you are not paying for the commission, the vendor is.

Where they appear on Toolhub

Currently, affiliate links appear in two places:

Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" in the HTML, which is the search-engine standard for declaring a commercial relationship.

Who pays

The vendor pays the commission, not you. If you ignore the affiliate link and sign up via the vendor's homepage directly, you get the same service at the same price; we just don't see a referral.

FTC and EU compliance

This page exists because the US Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guides and EU consumer-protection rules both require content creators to disclose when they have a financial relationship with a linked product. The disclosure has to be clear and up-front — hence a top-level page, hence linked from every page footer.

Specific affiliates

Toolhub currently uses these affiliate and support accounts (operator: JXXR1):

If/when other affiliate relationships are added, they will be listed here and the page will be redated.

No paid placement

Tool reviews, the order tools appear in on the homepage, and the "related tools" links on each tool are not affiliate-driven. We don't accept money to feature a tool, nor to rank one tool above another. If a paid placement ever did get added (it won't, but if), it would be labelled the same way affiliate links are: clearly, up-front, distinguishable from editorial content.

Editorial independence

Affiliate relationships do not influence which tools are built, how help-block copy is written, or which "related tools" appear under a given tool. The tools on Toolhub are the tools we'd build with no affiliate program at all — the program just makes a small contribution toward hosting and maintenance.

How we decide what gets recommended

The bar for adding any vendor to Toolhub's recommendations — affiliate or not — comes down to four checks:

  1. The product is one we'd use ourselves. If it's something Toolhub's maintainers wouldn't pay for out of their own pocket, it doesn't get recommended. DigitalOcean was added because the site itself runs on adjacent infrastructure; we know the experience first-hand.
  2. The pricing is transparent. No dark-pattern signups, no "free tier that secretly upgrades," no surprise auto-renewals at higher tiers. If a vendor's pricing page requires three clicks and a sales call to find a number, they don't get recommended.
  3. The commission isn't the reason. Several adjacent affiliate programs offer two-to-five-times the DigitalOcean commission. Toolhub doesn't carry them because the underlying product doesn't meet the first criterion.
  4. The vendor has a real refund / cancellation policy. Anything where leaving the service is harder than joining it gets a hard no.

What will never appear as an affiliate

Categories that are excluded by policy, regardless of commission rate:

This list exists because every one of those categories pays handsomely and every one of them quietly erodes the trust of the audience they reach. The exclusion is principled, not negotiable.

How affiliate revenue is used

Affiliate commissions and sponsor contributions go toward:

Toolhub is hosted on GitHub Pages, which is free for public repositories — so the actual cash cost of running the site is small. Any surplus after the items above is held in reserve or contributed to open-source projects whose libraries Toolhub depends on.

Contact

Questions about a specific affiliate, or want to flag something that looks like it shouldn't be here? Open an issue at https://github.com/JXXR1/Toolhub or use the contact page.