How we make money

Framing & Figures is free to read. It is paid for in two ways: display advertising and, where we join a software vendor's program, affiliate commissions. This page explains how each one works and what neither of them buys.

Advertising

We show display ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners choose and measure those ads; we do not sell ad space directly, and we do not know in advance which advertiser will appear on a page. Ads are labeled by the ad network.

We hold ourselves to three placement rules:

• no ads inside a calculator;
• no ads next to a calculator's result;
• no ads styled to look like our own content.

What Google's advertising cookies do, and how to turn off personalized ads, is covered in our privacy policy.

Affiliate and referral links

Some links on this site to software vendors may be affiliate links; at launch, none are. If you click one and then buy or sign up, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. You never pay more for using our link, and we are never paid by you.

Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored", which marks them as commercial in the page's own HTML. Links that are not affiliate links are ordinary links and carry nothing.

We take no referral fees, lead payments or commissions from surety or insurance providers. Payments for steering people to a bond or an insurance policy are regulated as insurance compensation in a number of states, and we would rather send you to a provider with nothing riding on it. If that ever changes, this page will say so before any such link goes live, and only where the law allows it.

What the money never buys

A commercial relationship (advertising, affiliate, referral or otherwise) never changes:

• a price we show;
• a rating or score we give;
• the order products appear in;
• whether a product is included, excluded or recommended at all.

Vendors do not review our pages before publication and cannot request changes except by reporting a factual error, which anyone can do. We publish prices from the vendor's own public pricing page with the date we checked it; a partner's price gets no more flattery than a non-partner's. Products with no commercial relationship are included on the same terms as products with one. See our editorial policy for how that independence is enforced day to day.

Why we tell you this

Because you are entitled to know who pays for what you are reading, and because the US Federal Trade Commission requires that a material connection between a publisher and a product be disclosed clearly and up front. Our rule: this page carries the full disclosure, and any page with affiliate links carries a short one on the page itself, before the first such link, pointing back here.

If anything here looks inconsistent with what you see on a page, tell us: [email protected].

Last updated September 23, 2026.