What an affiliate link is
An affiliate link is a normal link to another company's website that carries a short reference code identifying Tool Pantry. If you sign up for that company's paid plan, they pay us a commission. You pay the same price you would pay by visiting the company directly. We do not control their pricing, and we are not told who you are.
Where the links are
Affiliate links appear in two places, and nowhere else:
- The "If the free option isn't enough" box on a small number of tool pages.
- The alternatives and comparison pages, where a paid service is genuinely a different product rather than a better version of ours.
Every affiliate link goes through /go/ on this domain before it leaves. That is how the page you came from is reported back to us. Links marked this way also carry rel="sponsored", so crawlers and browser extensions can identify them.
What changes for you
Nothing about the tool you came for. The browser tools stay free, local, and unlimited. Nothing is gated, nothing is delayed, and no result is held behind a signup. If a paid service is not what you need, ignoring the box costs you nothing and the tool behaves exactly the same.
What we refuse to do
- No paid placement. A company cannot buy a spot in a comparison list. The order is our judgement and the drawbacks are written down next to the benefits.
- No hidden links. Affiliate links are inside a labelled box, not disguised as navigation or as a tool recommendation from the tool itself.
- No advertising scripts and no cookies. The
/go/redirect runs on our server and sets no cookie. The merchant may set its own cookies after you arrive; their privacy policy governs that, not ours. - No selling data. We have no account system, no email list, and no profile of you to sell.
How to check any of this
Open your browser's developer tools, watch the Network tab, and use any tool on the site: no request carries your file anywhere. Then click an affiliate link and look at the request to /go/ — it is a redirect with no cookie attached. If you find something that contradicts this page, tell us through the About page.
Why this matters for the tools
Free tools without ads have to be paid for somehow. Affiliate commissions are the least intrusive option we know of: the people who need a professional service pay for it through that service, and everyone else keeps using a free tool that never sees their files.