Who pays, and who does not

A handful of the outbound links in this count are commercial. Begin a subscription or a purchase through one and a commission reaches us; your side of the transaction is identical either way, to the penny. What this page sets out is where those links point and — the part worth more of your attention — where they deliberately do not.

The mechanics

Every outbound commercial link on this site is written as /go/ followed by a short name, and a single table in the code decides where that lands. No article anywhere in this repository contains a seller's URL, a tracking parameter or a network link — which means a partner arrangement can begin, change or end without a word of any article being rewritten.

That is not a technical flourish. It is the structural reason the writing here can be honest: the prose has no financial information embedded in it, so there is nothing in an article that changes when the commercial terms do.

What a commission does not buy

It does not buy a score. Licence card ratings grade the paperwork — how much of what you paid for you still hold a year later. Those numbers come from the terms, and a seller's commission rate is not one of the inputs.

It does not buy a ranking position. The count of where to get a website template is ordered by licence scope, support obligation and non-payment behaviour. The source we rank second pays nobody anything at all, because it is a free directory, and it sits there because its terms are genuinely the most generous on the page.

It does not buy a mention. Sellers cannot pay to appear, and none has been given sight of anything before publication.

Who is absent, and why

Two refusals are worth naming, because absence is easy to miss.

Sellers whose terms we could not read in full. If a licence page will not render for us and the terms cannot be established from the seller's own documentation, the seller does not get a partner link — regardless of programme. A site whose argument is that you should read the paperwork cannot be paid to send people somewhere whose paperwork it has not read. Where this has happened, the article says so plainly.

The second-hand theme resellers. There is a trade in reselling other authors' premium themes cheaply on the basis that GPL-licensed code may be redistributed. The legal argument about it has run for years unresolved and we take no position on it. The practical position is not ambiguous at all: no update channel, no support, and no way to verify what was altered on the way to you. Several of those operations run generous affiliate programmes. None appears here.

Honest limits

Commission rates differ between sellers, and pretending that creates no incentive at all would be naive. What we can tell you is the structure built to contain it: scores derive from documented terms, rankings derive from the same, the affiliate table is one file that touches no prose, and this page exists so you can check the claim against what you read.

If a page ever reads as though it were written to earn rather than to inform, that is worth telling us about. The counter is here.