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Affiliate disclosure

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In plain terms: some links on Data Room Reviews are affiliate links. If you click one and sign up with a virtual data room (VDR) provider, we may earn a commission. You pay nothing extra, and it never changes how we rank or score any provider.

This page follows the spirit of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on disclosing material connections. We want the arrangement to be obvious and easy to understand before you click anything, not buried in fine print.

An affiliate link is a link that lets a provider know you arrived from our site. If you then start a trial or buy a plan, the provider may pay us a referral commission as a thank-you for the introduction. It is a common way that independent review sites fund the work of testing products, and it is the primary way Data Room Reviews pays for its research.

The important part is what the commission does not do: it does not add anything to your price, and it does not buy the provider a better review.

Does it cost me anything extra?

No. You pay the provider exactly the same price whether you reach them through one of our links or by typing their address directly into your browser. The commission is paid by the provider out of its own marketing budget; it is never added to your bill. In some cases a provider may even offer a promotion that makes signing up through a link cheaper, never more expensive.

We keep this deliberately easy to tell apart.

  • Affiliate links carry a visible “Sponsored” label and use rel="sponsored nofollow". You will only find them in clearly commercial places: the ranked comparison table, the ranked shortlist, provider review widgets, and the result of our recommendation quiz. Some of these route through a /go/ link on our own domain before sending you to the provider.
  • Ordinary body links are not affiliate links. Links inside the text of our articles, guides, and reviews point to our own pages (our comparisons, pricing explainers, methodology, and related guides) or to primary sources such as the GDPR text, ISO, the AICPA, or the ICO. Body prose here does not link out to a provider for commission.
  • Citations and source links earn us nothing. When we link a law, a standard, an audit body, or a news report to back up a claim, there is no commercial relationship behind it.

If a link is not labelled “Sponsored,” you can assume we do not earn a commission from it.

How this affects our rankings and scores

It does not. This is the line we will not cross, and it is worth stating precisely.

  • Our scores are decided by hands-on testing against a fixed methodology, before any commercial terms enter the picture.
  • Ranking order follows the score. A larger commission never moves a provider up, and earning nothing from a provider never pushes it down.
  • We rank, and sometimes place highly, providers we have no affiliate relationship with at all.
  • No provider reviews, edits, or approves our verdicts, scores, or ranking order before we publish.

Testing VDRs properly takes real time: running trials, uploading files, checking permissions, verifying security certifications, and re-checking prices that change often. Affiliate commissions fund that work and let us keep our reviews free to read. We think that is a fair trade, provided we are honest about it and never let it bend our conclusions. Keeping those two things separate is the whole point of this page.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you want to confirm whether a specific link is an affiliate link, contact the editorial team through our contact form. We are happy to explain any commercial relationship behind anything you read on this site.