How we work
Affiliate and advertising disclosure
Effective August 28, 2026 · Version 1
Most disclosure pages get written after the money arrives, which is the wrong order. This one was written first, while there is nothing to disclose, so the rules were set before anyone had a reason to word them loosely.
The position as this page is written, stated plainly: Refund Radar carries no advertising, no sponsorship, and no affiliate links anywhere on the site, and earns nothing from any link on it. No merchant, airline, card issuer, marketplace, or claims service pays us for placement, for a mention, or for the order in which things appear.
What this page covers
It applies to every surface the site publishes: the scanner and its results, the guides, the topic hubs, the home page, any alert or reminder, and any email the site ever sends. It binds Oak and Main Developers LLC, which operates Refund Radar, and anyone writing or reviewing content for it.
A compensated link here means any link, button, or mention where anything of value reaches us because you clicked it, signed up, or bought something: affiliate commissions, referral fees, sponsorships, paid placements, and paid inclusion in a list. The amount does not matter.
Where things stand today
The links you do find are of two kinds. Official government resources are linked because they are the primary source for the rule being described. The occasional named company is named because the situation is about that company. Neither kind pays us anything.
The absences, stated so they can be checked line by line:
- No advertising slots, ad network code, or ad scripts anywhere on the site.
- No affiliate links, referral links, or revenue tracking parameters added to outbound links.
- No sponsored guides, sponsored sections, or paid mentions.
- No payment has been taken from any merchant, issuer, airline, marketplace, or claims service.
- No paid tier, and nothing on the site sits behind a payment.
The disclosure that must appear if this changes
If a compensated link is ever published, this exact text must appear immediately before the first such link on the page, in ordinary body text, at the same size as the copy around it, and visible without expanding, hovering over, or scrolling past anything:
"Affiliate disclosure: Refund Radar may earn a commission if you choose a partner through this link. This does not change the price you pay or the general information in this guide. Official consumer resources are shown separately."
The wording is fixed. It is not shortened for space, moved to the footer, reduced to a symbol or a line of small print, or hidden behind a link that says something like how we make money. One disclosure covers the page it appears on; another page carrying a compensated link needs its own.
It says nothing about what you will pay, and that is deliberate. A partner sets its own prices and can run link-specific, tiered, or coupon-linked pricing that we would have no sight of. If there is ever something specific and verified to say about a particular partner's pricing, it goes beside that partner's link and is re-checked when the link is, rather than being baked into wording that has to be reproduced word for word on every page.
Where a compensated link may never appear
Four places are closed to paid links at any price, because they are the points where you are acting on what the site says rather than reading about it.
- Inside a scan result. What the scanner shows is the output of published rules applied to your answers, and nothing sold may sit inside that output.
- Inside a suggested first route. The first move on a refund problem is almost always free, and the route shown first is never a paid placement.
- Inside a time-sensitive alert. An alert appears because the published rules flag a possible time limit for a situation like yours, never because someone paid for the placement. Whether a limit actually applies to you depends on your facts, on how you paid, and on where you are, and the scanner says so where it is uncertain.
- Inside a guide that weighs paid services against free routes. A comparison cannot carry a compensated link to one of the things being compared.
The free route comes first
Where a paid option and a free official route both exist, the free route is shown first and above the paid one, in the same type size and the same colour, and the paid option gets no tinted box, border, button, or badge that the free route does not also have. Official consumer resources stay in their own block rather than being mixed into a list that also holds a paid link.
If a compensated link cannot be placed somewhere else without breaking one of these rules, it does not get published. The test is simple: a reader who ignores every commercial link on this site should still reach the same official process, in the same order, in the same number of steps.
Payment cannot change what the site says
The scanner's logic runs in your browser, in code that is served to you and can be read. If a paid arrangement ever altered a result, the change would sit in something you can inspect rather than in something you have to take on trust. The rules below are the whole of the commitment, stated once here rather than repeated in every section they touch.
- Only arrangements that leave your price untouched. The disclosure above states that choosing a partner through a link here does not change the price you pay. That is a promise about someone else's pricing, so it is only honest if we refuse the arrangements that would break it: we will not enter a partnership that raises the reader's price, and we will not use a discount code or landing page whose terms are worse than the partner's own public offer. If a partner will not confirm that in writing, there is no link.
- No payment may change a recommendation, the order of a list, or the wording of a guide.
- No payment may change a scanner outcome, a signal, a confidence level, or an urgency label.
- No payment may cause an unfavourable fact about a partner to be softened or left out.
- A commercial relationship may not be a condition of appearing in a guide, and declining one may not be a reason to be left out of it.
How a partner would be chosen
There is no partner today and no candidate list. If there is ever one, these are the tests it has to pass before a link goes up.
- The paid option has to be something a reader might reasonably prefer, not the only route shown. Where the free route works for most people, it stays the recommendation.
- No compensated link to a service that takes a percentage of a refund you could claim free, that charges a fee before doing anything, or that asks for bank, inbox, or card credentials to do what you could do yourself.
- Before the link goes up, the destination is read the way you would read it: what it asks for, what it costs, what its cancellation terms say, and what it says it does with the data it collects.
- The relationship is disclosed even in a period when it happens to be paying nothing.
What happens after a link goes up
A review is a standard applied on a particular day. It is not an endorsement, and it is not a guarantee of a partner's service, pricing, terms, or data practices. Those belong to the partner, they can change without our knowing, and the partner's terms are the ones that would bind you — worth reading before you rely on them.
- Every live compensated link is re-checked at least every three months, on the same cycle as the pages that carry it.
- A material change means, at minimum: a fee charged before any work is done, a percentage cut where there was a flat fee, a new request for bank, inbox, or card credentials, a change of ownership, or a change in what the destination does with the data it collects.
- On learning of a material change, the link comes down first and is looked at afterwards. It goes back up only if it would pass the tests above as a new link today.
- A reader's report that a destination behaved differently from its own published terms is treated as a material change until it has been checked.
What you can check yourself
None of the above is worth much if you have to take it on trust. Three checks, none of which need anything you do not already have.
- Open the page source or your browser's network panel and look at what the page requests. An advertising or affiliate network would show up there.
- Look at an outbound link before you click it and see whether tracking parameters have been appended to it.
- Where a commercial link ever exists, read the disclosure above it against the fixed wording quoted on this page. Shortened, moved, or missing means we have broken our own rule.
If we get it wrong
Write to [email protected] with the page address and what you saw. The link comes down or the disclosure goes up while the question is being checked rather than after it, and you are told what we found. If the page was wrong, the correction is made on the page itself, so the next reader sees it rather than only the person who wrote in.
We are not the outside authority on this. In the United States the FTC sets the rules on endorsements and disclosures, and it takes reports about advertising that is not disclosed properly. Look up its guidance on advertising disclosures on ftc.gov if you want to read the standard we are meant to be meeting, or to report a site that is not.
When this page is reviewed
This page is reviewed at least every three months by Refund Radar editorial (Oak and Main Developers LLC), the same owner and the same cycle named on every guide, and immediately on any change to monetisation or to how the site handles data.
A change in how the site earns money is made here in the same release that makes it anywhere else, not afterwards. The same commitments appear on the terms page under the heading about paid placement in results; if one of them changes, both change together.
The exceptions that catch people out
Four things a page like this gets read as saying, and does not.
- A named company is not a partner. Guides name airlines, issuers, marketplaces, and platforms because your problem is with one of them.
- An official government link is not an endorsement of anything commercial, and no agency has any relationship with this site.
- Free today is not a promise of free forever. If a paid feature is ever added, this page is updated before it launches, and every commitment above applies to it unchanged.
- This page governs money and placement. It decides nothing about your refund: whether one is owed depends on the facts, the terms you agreed to, how you paid, and the rules where you are.