How we make money

When you click certain links on this site and go on to start a service, we may receive a commission from that company. It costs you nothing extra — you pay the same price you would have paid arriving directly.

What that commission buys the company is a link. It does not buy coverage, a rating, a verdict, or the removal of criticism. Position at the top of a ranking canbe bought — and where it has been, the entry carries a “Sponsored placement” label, the list says so before you reach it, and the score and drawbacks are exactly what they would have been otherwise.

Affiliate commissions

Our primary source. We participate in affiliate programmes run by telehealth services and retailers. When a reader signs up through a tracked link, the company pays us a fee — typically a fixed amount per new customer or a percentage of an initial order.

Display advertising

If and when we run display advertising, it will be clearly distinguishable from editorial content and labelled as advertising. Advertisers will have no influence over editorial content or placement.

What we do not do

• We do not sell sponsored articles, and we do not sell favourable coverage. We do sell labelled placement at the top of a ranking, which is disclosed on the ranking itself.
• We do not accept payment to remove or soften criticism.
• We do not sell or rent reader data to anyone.
• We do not operate a pharmacy, clinic or telehealth service, so we have no product of our own to push.

We list this explicitly rather than making you guess. The following services in our reviews are or may be commercial partners:

• CoreAge Rx — paid partner
• Hims — paid partner
• Ro — paid partner
• BlueChew — paid partner
• Lemonaid Health — paid partner
• Rex MD — paid partner
• GoodRx — paid partner
• Amazon Pharmacy — paid partner
• Sesame — paid partner

And the following are in our reviews despite paying us nothing:

• Your local pharmacy — no commercial relationship
• Cost Plus Drugs — no commercial relationship
• Costco Pharmacy — no commercial relationship
• Teladoc Health — no commercial relationship

That last group is the important one. Our highest-scoring recommendation — getting a prescription from your own clinician and filling it at a retail pharmacy with a free discount card — earns us nothing at all. It is there because it is frequently the best option, and because a disclosure that says we cover non-paying options has to be true to be worth anything.

1. A disclosure appears near the top of every page that carries a paid link — before you reach the link, as FTC guidance requires.
2. Partner buttons carry the words “Partner link” and a note that we may earn a commission.
3. Every review states plainly whether the service is a paid partner, and the reviews index has a column for it.
4. Technically, monetised links carry rel=“sponsored nofollow”, which is what the FTC and search engines expect of paid links.

• Scoring precedes commercial discussion. Ratings are set against our published rubric and are not revisited because of a partnership.
• Partners see nothing before publication. No approval, no preview, no right of reply built into the process.
• We criticise partners in public.Read any of our reviews — the cons sections are not decorative. Where a partner carries a “Recommended” label, the cons next to it are the same ones we would print without the partnership.
• Recommendations are scoped, not blanket. The label always says who a product is for. That constraint is what keeps it honest, and it is why you will see it on something with a moderate score. What each label means sets out the difference between the labels you can buy and the ones you cannot.
• We recommend against paying us. Our cost guidance repeatedly points readers to retail pharmacies, which earn us nothing, over subscriptions that do.
• Disqualifying practices override revenue. A service that sells prescription medication without a prescription, or claims to cure ED, is not listed at any price.

Because the alternative is a single grey line at the bottom of the page saying “this site may earn commissions”, which technically satisfies nobody and informs nobody.

Health content funded by commissions is a genuinely difficult thing to do well. The mechanism that pays for it is the same mechanism that could corrupt it. Publishing the details is how you get to judge whether we are managing that honestly — and how you get to hold us to it.

Questions or concerns: editorial@edtreatmentguides.com.