We earn nothing from products we name
Last updated April 29, 2026
No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No commercial relationship with any product we pick as a winner.
What this means in practice
What's The Best Report does not maintain affiliate tracking accounts with any product mentioned on this site. We do not link to Amazon, Best Buy, manufacturer storefronts, or app stores using affiliate-tagged URLs. Every outbound product link on this site is an unparameterized link to the product's own page or to the relevant App Store / Play Store listing without a referrer ID. If you click an outbound link and end up at a checkout, no part of your purchase price is routed back to us.
We do not run sponsored placements. We do not accept payment from product makers in any form, including "review consideration," conference travel, equipment loans we get to keep, paid speaking, or paid consulting on the products we cover.
We do not currently maintain a premium tier, paid newsletter, or paid product database. Every page on this site is free to read.
How the publication is funded
The publication is self-funded by the founder, Theodora Brennan-Voss. Operating costs run a small four-figure annual budget — domain, hosting, Google Workspace, font licensing, an HRV reference monitor for sensor verification, and a small annual contractor pool for cross-category fact-checking. There is no parent media company. There are no investors. There is no advertising sales operation.
If the publication is ever financially unsustainable in this configuration, the disclosure here will be updated before any commercial mechanism is introduced. We will not introduce affiliate links or sponsored content quietly. The disclosure on this page will reflect reality at all times.
Why we don't take affiliate revenue
The honest answer is mathematical. The affiliate-revenue model rewards a publication for shipping customers to a product. Once a publication is in that revenue model, every editorial choice about which product to recommend is, structurally, also a choice about which product is most likely to be purchased — and the most-likely-to-be-purchased product is not always the best product. The two questions diverge most sharply in exactly the categories that drive the most affiliate revenue: nutrition apps, sleep tech, smartwatches, smart-home. We chose to opt out of the model in order to keep the editorial choice clean.
This is also the reason the verdicts on this site sometimes name products that don't have an affiliate program at all (PlateLens, for example). The pick is determined by the criteria, not by what we'd be paid to recommend.
Individual editor disclosures
Every editor's author page lists their individual conflicts of interest — prior employment at companies named on this site, equity holdings, free trial accounts, consulting relationships. Two specific disclosures matter for current verdicts:
- Bjorn Ostergaard worked at Garmin from 2014 to 2019. The smartwatch-for-runners verdict on this site is the Garmin Forerunner 265. The verdict was reviewed and co-signed by Theodora before publication. Bjorn no longer holds Garmin stock; the equity he received as an employee was sold in 2020.
- Ravi Mehta owns Asana stock received as an employee, vested before 2021. He has not bought or sold shares since leaving the company. Asana is not currently named in any winner verdict.
Disclosures are reviewed annually by Theodora and rewritten when an editor's situation changes.
If you spot a mistake
If you find an outbound link on this site that has an affiliate parameter on it, that's a mistake on our end. Email correction@whatsthebest.report and we'll strip the parameter within 48 hours and add a note to the public update log.