Who pays us, and the things we turn down
Some training links on this site are paid. The certifying bodies never are. Here is the whole arrangement, including the parts we refuse.
The short version
Links to training providers — the ones written as /go/ addresses and marked sponsored nofollow — may pay us a commission if you subscribe after following one. You pay the same price you would have paid arriving any other way. Links to ISC2, CompTIA, ISACA, OffSec, EC-Council, Coursera's course pages as sources, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics are ordinary links that pay us nothing.
Who can pay us
Six providers of training, labs and courses: Hack The Box, TryHackMe, Simplilearn, KnowledgeHut, Edureka and Coursera. Where a provider requires disclosure of the relationship as a condition of its programme — Hack The Box does — that disclosure appears next to the link itself as well as here.
One of those relationships has a caveat worth stating. TryHackMe's affiliate page could not be read when this site's programme research was done, so we have no confirmed terms for it. We still link TryHackMe, and we still tell you the relationship exists; we simply quote none of its terms.
Who cannot pay us, ever
The certifying bodies. ISC2, CompTIA and ISACA are the source for every exam fee, domain weighting, experience requirement and renewal rule on this site. A source we were paid by would not be a source, so those pages are cited as plain links and always will be, whatever programmes may exist in future. The same applies to OffSec and EC-Council, which we cite and do not monetise.
What we refuse
- Exam dumps and brain-dump sites. Not linked, not named as an option, not described as a study method. Reproducing live exam items breaks the agreement you accept before the exam starts and puts the credential you paid for at risk. People do search for them; the answer on this site is this paragraph.
- Paid placement in any ranking. No provider can buy a position, a score or a mention. The order on our comparison pages is the order of career stages, and the top two entries on the money page are issued by bodies that pay us nothing.
- Coupon and promo-code pages. They are thin pages that exist to intercept a search, they go stale within weeks, and several providers void codes they did not issue.
- Sponsored posts and pre-written reviews. No provider has seen a page here before publication and none has any editorial input.
- Guaranteed-outcome offers. We do not promote job guarantees or income-share agreements, and we do not repeat placement figures a school has not had audited.
Things we recommend that earn us nothing
TryHackMe's free tier, which is genuinely enough to find out whether you like the work. OffSec's OSCP, where we are in no programme at all. Coursera's financial aid route. And the cheapest advice on the site: open the exam outline on the issuing body's own page, free, and find out how much of it you already know before you buy anything.
If this ever changes
Once a refusal is on this page it stays readable; undoing one means editing this page in public. If we ever take money from a certifying body or link a provider we have ruled out above, this page changes first, in plain words, with the date — and the pages affected change with it. Questions go to [email protected].