How we make money
We say exactly how, on every page.
If a site reviews money products, you deserve to know one thing up front: how does it get paid? So here's the whole thing, brand by brand. Short version — we make money when you act on a decision you can stand behind, never when you got misled. And the people who score the products don't touch the money.
The one rule underneath all of it
What we get paid never moves a review’s score, its order, or which products a brand covers. Ratings come straight from each brand’s published methodology, applied the same way to every product in the lane. Where a brand earns from a recommendation, it says so — right there on the page. The whole money model is built to be checked, not hidden.
Small-business financing
ClearValue Lending
Revenue model: broker referrals
ClearValue Lending is a brokerage, not a direct lender. When a small business decides to move forward with a financing option, the lender or funding partner pays a referral or broker fee for the introduction. That fee is how the brand keeps the lights on — and it is disclosed on the page.
What that fee does not do is decide which option a business is shown first. The brand’s job is to surface the financing a business can actually service — the real cost, the real terms, and the tradeoff behind each option, named out loud — regardless of which partner pays more. If the cheaper option pays the smaller fee, the cheaper option still wins the recommendation.
Visit ClearValue LendingCredit-card reviews
ClearValue Cards
Revenue model: affiliate hand-off after the quiz
ClearValue Cards scores credit cards on a published 100-point methodology, ranked by fit rather than by commission. Readers take a short quiz to find their match. When a reader chooses to act on a match, the brand hands them off to a card-comparison affiliate network, which pays ClearValue Cards a referral fee if the reader proceeds with the issuer.
The scoring happens before any of that, and independently of it. The quiz matches a reader to cards by fit; the methodology decides the ratings; the affiliate relationship changes neither. The review desk is walled off from the revenue side, so what a card pays cannot move it up the rankings or into the quiz results.
Visit ClearValue CardsFinance book reviews
Lane in definitionClearValue Books
Revenue model: Amazon Associates affiliate
ClearValue Books earns through the Amazon Associates program: when a reader buys a recommended book or tool through one of its links, Amazon pays a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to the reader. The same rule holds — a recommendation is made because the resource is worth recommending, not because it earns a commission.
This lane is still being defined to the same published-standard bar as the rest of the family, so it is not yet part of the audited entity graph. Its monetization is disclosed here for completeness.
Visit ClearValue BooksThe wall, restated
The desk that scores never sees the money.
Across all three brands, reviewer compensation is never tied to a product’s ranking or to whether a reader acts. Advertisers and affiliate partners do not preview ratings, buy placement, or decide coverage. If a commercial relationship ever conflicted with the methodology, the methodology wins.
Read the editorial standard