Who pays us, and who does not

The short version

Seven products on this site can be reached through a commercial link. One of the strongest recommendations here — a public broadcaster's free German course — earns nothing and never will. A widely used free app is deliberately excluded from the commercial arrangement entirely.

As of 24 September 2026, no programme has approved this domain. Every commercial link currently points at the seller's ordinary front page, and this site has earned nothing from any of them.

The links that are commercial

These seven are reached through a redirect on this domain, are tagged as sponsored links for search engines, and are labelled wherever they appear: Babbel, Lingoda, Rocket German, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, Preply and italki.

If one of those programmes approves this site and you buy something after following one of those links, the seller may pay this site. You pay the same either way.

The links that are not

Deutsche Welle. Germany's public international broadcaster publishes the free German course that this site recommends ahead of everything with a price on it. It is not a partner, it is not reachable through the commercial redirect, and it will never pay us anything. It is recommended because it is the correct first answer, and it is at the top of the board for that reason alone.

Duolingo. It runs no affiliate programme of any kind — there is nothing to join. It is named where it is genuinely the right answer, it is linked plainly, and it earns nothing. It is deliberately not in the redirect map, so a programme appearing in future could not quietly convert an existing recommendation into a paid one.

The Goethe-Institut, telc and ÖSD. Certifying bodies, which would be sources rather than partners. In our case they are not even that, because their pages refused our requests.

What a commercial link does not buy

It does not buy position. The board is ordered by what each route is good at, and the free option sits above every paid one.

It does not buy silence. Every paid product on this site carries the unflattering thing we found about it: that one will not publish its price, that one served us a currency we did not ask for, that one makes its discount conditional on attendance, that one advertises an outcome it does not define.

The clearest case is Rocket German, which is a commercial partner. The money page works out from Rocket's own published columns that its German package carries the fewest speaking drills of the five of its courses we checked, at an identical price. We would rather publish that than a page that only mentions the flattering half, because a site that suppresses the second half is not worth reading for the first.

No rate, cookie or network appears anywhere

You will not find a commission percentage, a cookie window or a network name on any page here.

Four of these seven — Lingoda, Rocket German, Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone — are marked unverified in the fleet's own partner research, meaning the only available figures come from third-party affiliate directories that contradict each other on both the network and the cookie length for the same brand. A fifth, Babbel, publishes official terms for its EU and UK programme only; its US figures are third-party as well. Publishing a number we cannot check at source would break the rule the rest of this site runs on.

Things ruled out that would make money

Each of these is a decision, and each one costs something.

No coupon or promo-code pages. They rank, they convert, and they are thin, stale within weeks, and in some programmes actively harmful to the buyer, because an unapproved code can void the sale they just made.

No ratings out of ten. A score would help this site compete in search results. We have run no controlled trial of a German course, and a number without a trial behind it is decoration dressed as evidence, so there is no rating box anywhere on this site.

No exam fees copied from elsewhere. Pages about exam costs are valuable and we cannot write them honestly, so we have not written them.

No sponsored posts, paid placements, guest articles or link insertions, and no advertising.

No timelines to fluency, which are the highest-converting sentences in this entire category.

If any of this changes

A recommendation on this site cannot be changed by money arriving. If a programme approves this domain, the only thing that changes is that a link which previously earned nothing starts to earn something — the ordering, the wording and the criticisms stay where they are.

If that ever stops being true, this page has to be rewritten first, in public, before the page it affects. That is the point of writing it down in this much detail.

Questions, or a correction to anything above: the address is on the contact page.