How Phrasebench gets paid

The arrangement

When a page here links to an app through a partner link — always routed via this site's /go/ address, always tagged sponsored and nofollow, always with a note beside it — and you go on to subscribe, that app's affiliate program can pay Phrasebench a commission. You pay the app whatever the app charges; the commission comes out of the vendor's side of the transaction. The apps with which such an arrangement can exist on this site are: Babbel, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, Busuu, Memrise, Mondly, Ling and Rocket Languages.

What the money never buys

Rankings, positions, adjectives or silence. Two of the most-recommended apps on this site — Duolingo, whose free tier we suggest constantly, and Speak, which we cover in the AI roundup — run no affiliate program at all: those links are plain, and they earn us exactly nothing. We also print vendors' bad news where it belongs on the page, commission or not: Busuu's parent company's financial trouble sits inside every recommendation of Busuu, not buried here.

What we refuse on principle

• No coupon or promo-code pages. They're bait, they go stale, and several programs void unapproved codes anyway.
• No printing commission rates, cookie windows or network names for programs whose terms we could only find in third-party directories — those directories contradict each other, and repeating them would dress guesses as facts.
• No moving an app up a page because it pays more, and no dropping a free recommendation because it pays nothing. If we ever can't afford that rule, we'll close the site rather than bend it.

How to spot a paid link

Partner links point at addresses beginning /go/ and carry a disclosure sentence in or beside their button or paragraph; everything else is an ordinary link. If you find a partner link anywhere on this site that isn't marked that way, that's a bug in our honesty — report it and we'll fix it and say so.