Home / Ethics & disclosure

How this site makes money

A free tool in the trading niche is usually free because you are the product, or because somebody is being paid to send you to a broker. Here is exactly how TapeSheet is funded, the rules we have committed to in advance, and a list of every commercial partner we have.

Last updated: 24 September 2026

The plan, in one paragraph

Advertising on content pages — guides, calculators, glossary entries, blog posts — is intended to pay for the domain and the time. The tool itself carries no advertising and never will. The whole architecture exists to make that survivable: static files on a CDN with no backend and no per-user cost, so the hosting bill stays near zero and we are never forced into a decision we would regret by a monthly invoice.

Rules we have committed to

1. Never advertising inside the tool

No advertisement, affiliate link or sponsored placement appears in the analyzer, dashboard, journal, trade drawer or prop-firm tracker. An ad next to “your file never leaves your device” would read as a contradiction, and it would be one. This is enforced in code, not by intention. The analyzer is a self-contained file that carries no ad code at all — its APP_ADS_ENABLED constant is hard-wired off and there is no network call that could fetch an ad — and the test suite fails the build if an ad element ever appears inside it. The site config also lists /app/ in AD_FREE_PATHS, which would stop an ad slot rendering if any part of the analyzer were ever served as a normal page.

2. Revenue share over one-off commissions

If broker partnerships ever happen, we prefer ongoing revenue share to a one-off payment per signup. A per-signup bounty pays us most when you open an account and stop trading; a revenue share only pays if the broker actually suited you. We would rather be paid by the outcome we would want for you anyway.

3. Regulated partners only

Any broker or firm we take money from must be meaningfully regulated. The prop-firm sector in particular has seen operators shut down by regulators with client funds unresolved, and recommending a firm that then vaporises somebody’s account is not a mistake you recover from with an apology page.

4. No paid rankings, ever

Nobody can buy a recommendation or a mention. Where this site ranks or orders anything, the criteria are stated on the page and the ordering follows from them. If we cannot defend an ordering on stated criteria, we do not publish the ordering.

5. Disclosure at the top, in plain English

Any page carrying an affiliate link says so at the top, before the content, in a sentence a normal person can read — not a grey line beneath the footer. Every such relationship also appears in the table below.

6. Presets are utility, not marketing

The prop-firm rule presets in the tracker exist because they are useful, and they are kept separate from any commercial relationship. A preset for a firm is never evidence that we recommend that firm, and a firm page will never quietly become a landing page for a referral link.

Every commercial partner

The table on this page will list the partner, what kind of arrangement it is, which pages carry it, and the date it started. If you are reading this and the list is still empty, it is still empty.

Advertising, as it stands today

No advertisement is served anywhere on this site yet. Google AdSense has been applied to, and while that application is reviewed the AdSense script is loaded on content pages — guides, calculators, the glossary and pages like this one — so that Google can verify the site. No ad unit has been requested, so nothing is drawn where an advertisement would later sit: no box, no label, no reserved height. Nothing is earned. The analyzer, the dashboard, the journal and the 404 page load none of it, and the test suite verifies that on every build.

When an ad network is switched on, three things happen in the same change: the privacy policy is updated to describe it, the /ads.txt file lists the authorised sellers, and the test that forbids third-party requests is narrowed to content pages rather than removed — so it keeps failing the build if anything ever loads inside the analyzer. All three have already happened, at the point the script went on the page rather than at the point an ad first pays for anything.

What we will not do

• Sell, rent or share your data. The analyzer never sends us your statement, and one you donate for testing is kept only until you ask us to delete it and is never sold, rented or shared.
• Run session recording, heatmaps, or any analytics that watches what you do with your own trading data.
• Nag you about ad blockers. If you block ads here, that is fine, and the tool works identically.
• Gate a feature that works today behind a payment tomorrow.
• Publish a “best broker” list ordered by what it pays.
• Claim or imply that using this tool will make you profitable.

Hold us to it

If you find something on this site that breaks one of these rules, tell us and we will fix it or remove it: hello@tapesheet.com. A rule nobody checks is a slogan.