Partners & Transparency

How Vannus makes money — and what it never touches.

Vannus is an AI tool selection platform built around an elimination-first methodology — we evaluate AI tools across nine trust dimensions and remove the ones that fail. No vendor can pay for a score, a ranking, or inclusion — and affiliate links never influence any of them. We do earn affiliate commissions on some tools that survive evaluation (disclosed per-partner below); the page explains exactly how that revenue is structurally walled off from the scoring engine.

How Vannus Makes Money

Vannus offers affiliate links to tools that survive our evaluation process. When you sign up for a tool through a partner link on this site, we may earn a commission.

Here's what that means and — more importantly — what it doesn't mean.

What Affiliate Partnerships DO NOT Affect

• Scores. Every tool in our database is scored by the same elimination engine using the same criteria. Partner tools receive no scoring bonus, no weight adjustment, and no favorable treatment. A partner tool that scores poorly is eliminated the same as any other tool.
• Rankings. Search results, elimination outcomes, and diagnosis recommendations are computed independently of commercial relationships. The algorithm does not know which tools have affiliate agreements.
• Inclusion. Tools are not added to our database because they offer affiliate programs. Tools are added based on market relevance and user demand.
• Visibility. Partner tools do not receive preferential placement in search results, category pages, or the elimination pipeline. The evaluation surfaces are commercially neutral.

What Affiliate Partnerships DO Affect

• "Try This Tool" links. On a tool's detail page, below the evaluation scores, you may see a "Try [Tool Name]" button. If we have an affiliate agreement with that tool, the link includes our tracking code. This is always labeled.
• Revenue. Affiliate commissions help fund Vannus's continued development and keep the free tier available.

How to Verify Our Independence

Every evaluation Vannus produces is reproducible. The methodology page explains the nine trust dimensions, the input signals per dimension, and the elimination logic. If a partner tool receives a score you question, contact us and we will walk you through every signal that contributed. The synthesis weighting itself is proprietary, but any individual score can be audited end-to-end on request.