How Contractor ToolStack makes money
Somebody pays for every review site you have ever read. Most of them make you dig for who. Here is the whole arrangement on one page, including the parts that are awkward to put in writing.
The short version
Contractor ToolStack earns three ways: affiliate commissions when you buy software through our links, vendors paying $99 a year or $149 a month to publish a labeled profile page, and vendors paying for a labeled box beside our rankings. Reviews, scores, and ranking positions are not sold. Of 74 products covered, 52 pay us nothing and 2 vendors are running a paid profile as of September 11, 2026.
Who pays for this site?
Software companies do, in three separate ways, and none of them involve buying an opinion. Affiliate programs pay a commission when a reader signs up. Vendor programs charge a flat fee for a labeled page and labeled placement. Referral programs pay for an introduction a reader specifically asked us to make. Readers pay nothing and see no display ads.
The reason all three are listed here rather than buried in a terms page is that the arrangement only works if you can check it. Every claim below has something on the site you can go look at.
How do affiliate commissions work here?
When you sign up for software through one of our links, the vendor pays us a commission, and you pay the same price you would have paid going direct. The money comes out of their marketing budget, not your invoice. Structures vary: a flat amount per signup, a percentage of your first year, or a recurring cut for as long as you stay a customer.
Of the 74 products on this site, 22 have a program we are part of and 52 pay us nothing. Some of the highest-rated products here pay zero, and several products with strong commission rates score below 4.0 with the reasons written out on their pages. Commission rates are not an input to the rubric, and there is no line in our scoring where they could be.
Every affiliate link carries rel="nofollow sponsored", which is the machine-readable version of this
paragraph, and every page containing one shows a disclosure line above the content.
What is a paid vendor profile?
A vendor profile is a page the software company writes and pays to publish at /vendors/their-name/.
Vendor Basic costs $99 a year and buys the page alone. A Verified Vendor Profile costs $149 a month or $1,290 a
year and adds labeled placement beside rankings. It is their positioning, their pricing, their screenshots, and
their pitch, and it is not a review.
Three things make it impossible to mistake one for editorial: a banner at the top saying the vendor wrote it and paid for it, the words "Vendor profile · Sponsored" above the product name, and a listing on the vendor profiles index alongside every other company paying us. Here is what that banner looks like on a live profile.
We publish these for an unglamorous reason. More than forty software companies emailed us this summer wanting to influence their coverage. Giving them a labeled page to argue their own case, in their own words, where nobody mistakes it for a review, is a cleaner answer than the alternative, which is that pressure leaks quietly into editorial instead.
Do paying vendors rank higher?
No. Sponsored placement appears in a bordered box labeled "Sponsored · Also consider," and that box sits outside the ranked list. The ranked list is ordered by rating. A sponsor rated 3.2 stays at 3.2 and stays wherever 3.2 puts them in the order. What a vendor buys is an ad beside the results, never a position inside them.
If you ever find a paid placement on this site that is not labeled, that is a bug, not a policy. Tell us and it gets fixed the same day.
When does a vendor get my contact information?
Only when you tick the box asking for an introduction on the recommendation form. Leave it unticked and no vendor receives your name, company, email, or phone number, including the ones paying us. The shortlist we send back is free, and it is the same shortlist whether you want an introduction or not.
When you do ask, the vendor may pay us for that introduction. Several run formal referral programs that pay for a booked demo or a signup. When more than one product genuinely fits your situation we name all of them and tell you which ones pay us.
What about paid review campaigns?
A vendor can pay $299 for a 30-day campaign where we collect reviews from license-verified contractors who use their product. They receive every review that comes back, positive and negative, unfiltered. Incentives are capped at $50 per reviewer and every incentivized review is labeled as one, matching what G2 and Capterra publish. A campaign changes how much feedback exists. It does not touch the editorial score.
What is not for sale, at any price
- A review. Any vendor can request one free. It publishes when it is finished, with whatever score it earns, and they do not see it first.
- A score. Ratings come from a weighted rubric per category plus votes from license-verified contractors. The formula and the weights are published on how we review.
- A ranking position. Rankings follow the scores, and nothing else moves them.
- Deleting criticism. Factual corrections get checked and fixed for anyone. Opinions a vendor dislikes stay.
- Advance notice or a veto. Paying vendors do not preview reviews and cannot hold one back.
How do I verify any of this myself?
Five checks, none of which require taking our word for it. Paid pages live under /vendors/, say
"Sponsored" in the browser tab, and are listed together on the index. Sponsored boxes have
the word Sponsored on them. Affiliate links are tagged sponsored in the HTML, visible by inspecting
the page. Every page with an affiliate link carries a disclosure above the content. And scores are computed from
dimension weights printed on the category pages themselves, so you can check the arithmetic.
Who runs Contractor ToolStack?
Steven Risher writes it, and Contractor ToolStack, LLC operates it. He is a Louisiana tradesman from a multi-generational construction family who has worked as a laborer across every residential trade, written estimates for general contractors, and project-managed for roofing companies. It is an independent publication. No software company owns any part of it or has ever had approval over anything published here. The longer version is on the about page.
Frequently asked questions
No. Reviews, scores, and ranking positions are not for sale at any price. Ratings are computed from a weighted rubric per category, published on our methodology page, applied to dimension scores we assign. Of the 74 products on this site, 52 pay us nothing at all and are reviewed the same way as the 22 that do. Several products that pay us well score below 4.0 and say so on their own page.
A vendor profile is a page the software company writes and pays to publish, at /vendors/their-name/. Vendor Basic is $99 a year for the page alone. A Verified Vendor Profile is $149 a month and adds a labeled "Sponsored" box beside rankings. Every profile carries a banner saying the vendor wrote it, the browser tab says "Sponsored," and all of them are listed together at /vendors/. A review is written by Steven Risher, scored on the rubric, and cannot be bought.
No. Sponsored placement appears in a separate box labeled "Sponsored · Also consider," positioned outside the ranked list. The ranked list is ordered by rating, and a sponsor with a 3.2 rating stays at 3.2 and stays wherever 3.2 puts them. Paying moves a vendor into a labeled ad next to the results, never into the results.
Only if you tick the box asking for an introduction. If you leave it unticked, no vendor receives your name, company, email, or phone number, including vendors who pay us. The shortlist we email back is free either way and is the same shortlist either way. Vendors may pay us for an introduction you asked for; they cannot buy one you did not.
Affiliate links carry rel="nofollow sponsored" in the HTML, which you can see by right-clicking and choosing Inspect. Every page containing one also displays a disclosure line above the content before you read a word of the review. Of 74 products covered, 22 have a program we participate in.
A factual correction gets checked against the vendor's own documentation and fixed if it is actually wrong, exactly as it would for a vendor who has never paid us anything. An opinion they dislike stays. Paying vendors do not preview reviews before publication and have no veto. If a vendor makes payment conditional on changing a score, the answer is no and the program ends.
Found a placement that is not labeled, or think something here is wrong? Tell us. Corrections are free, and we publish them.
