Disclosure
How Affiliate Links Work
Some links on this site — in reviews, comparisons, and best-of lists — are affiliate links. If you sign up for a VPN through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This is one of the ways VPN Crest funds the testing and writing behind every review, and we'd rather state that plainly than bury it in fine print.
Why This Doesn't Affect Our Scores
Every provider on this site is scored using the exact same Methodology — security, speed, and price & value — regardless of whether an affiliate relationship exists. A provider paying a higher commission does not get a higher score, a better ranking slot, or softer language about a real security weakness. We test first and sort out any commercial relationship separately; the two never influence each other.
Why This Matters More in the VPN Category Specifically
VPN affiliate commissions can be unusually large compared to other product categories, which is exactly why we think transparency here matters more than most. A review site with an incentive that large and no visible separation between revenue and scoring should not be trusted blindly — including this one. Judge us by whether a provider's real security weaknesses show up in our reviews even when that provider pays a generous commission, not just by whether we disclose that commissions exist.
How We Choose What to Recommend
Our recommendations start from testing, not from which affiliate programs exist. When we decide to publish a review or add a provider to a Best VPN list, that decision is made by evaluating the provider against our criteria first. Only afterward do we check whether an affiliate program is available, and if one isn't, we cover the provider anyway with the same depth. Several providers on this site carry no commercial relationship to us at all, scored identically to ones that do.
Editorial Independence in Practice
The people writing and scoring reviews don't see which affiliate deals generate the most revenue, and no one's pay is tied to how a review performs commercially. If a partner provider had a real security incident or a lapsed audit, we'd lower the score and say so directly — that's the actual test of whether this separation holds up, not just whether we claim it does.
What We Never Do
We don't accept payment for a guaranteed positive review, a specific score, or a spot on a ranked list. We don't let a provider preview or approve review copy before publication. We don't soften a real security finding — a leaked DNS request, a lapsed audit, a jurisdiction concern — because the provider is a commercial partner. If a review ever reads like marketing copy from the provider itself, that's a mistake worth reporting.
If We Ever Ran Sponsored Content
We don't currently run sponsored posts or paid placements. If that ever changes, sponsored material would be labeled clearly and kept entirely separate from our tested, scored content — never folded into the rating system.
Keeping This Page Honest
We'll update this disclosure any time our funding model or editorial process actually changes. What you're reading reflects how things work as of the site's most recent content update.
Something Doesn't Add Up?
If anything here seems inconsistent with what you're seeing elsewhere on the site, tell us through our Contact page — we'd rather hear about it and fix it than have it sit unnoticed.
How This Compares to Sites That Don't Disclose Anything
Plenty of VPN comparison sites exist purely as affiliate funnels with no independent testing behind them — a ranking that happens to put the highest-commission provider first isn't a coincidence in those cases, it's the entire business model. We'd rather be transparent about running on affiliate revenue while still proving, through a public methodology and named reviewers, that the revenue model and the ranking are kept apart. Judge that separation by whether a partner provider's real security weaknesses actually show up in our reviews, not just by whether we admit affiliate links exist.