Advertiser disclosure

Direct partners

This is not a representative sample or a list of “selected partners”. It is every direct commercial relationship that exists, maintained in the site’s source code so that its history is auditable. Separately we run an affiliate network, described below, which can monetize outbound links to merchants we have no direct relationship with.

Prepaid sponsored placements

Business lenders and lending marketplaces can buy a block of clicks on one funding-type placement. The placement sits in a separate, labelled paid lane, never in a ranking or table. We are paid per click by the lender, not per application and never by a borrower, and the only thing that passes to the lender is the click itself. Every placement is reviewed before it runs, including the lender’s NMLS ID, FDIC certificate or state licence, and every approval, pause and completion is recorded in a log that is never edited.

No sponsored placement is running right now.

The rules we hold ourselves to

• Rankings are computed, not sold. Every league table on this site is generated from the SBA’s loan-level federal data by a published formula. Paid relationships are not an input to any of them. See methodology.
• Paid placement is labelled and separated. Where a company has paid for placement, it carries a visible “Sponsored” marker and appears in its own section - never interleaved with editorial results in a way that could be mistaken for a ranking. No paid placement is running right now.
• Disclosure appears before the link, not after. Any page carrying a monetized link shows the advertiser disclosure above the fold.
• We disclose only what is true. Pages with no monetized links carry no commission claim. Overclaiming a relationship would be as misleading as hiding one.
• A partner appears only where it operates. An SBA 7(a) partner is shown on a state, industry, or lender page only when that segment has 7(a) lending at a size the partner makes, judged from the page’s own SBA rows; the reason is printed beside the link. A business-purchase partner appears only on pages about buying a business or franchise.
• Coverage is not for sale. We write about companies we earn nothing from, and we decline to write about companies we do earn from when there is nothing worth saying. A payment buys a link, never an opinion.
• We publish unflattering numbers about partners. If a partner’s charge-off rate is above average, its lender profile says so, in the same words we would use about anyone else.

Categories we will not take money from

We do not accept compensation from merchant cash advance funders, debt relief companies, or credit repair services. We cover merchant cash advances editorially - including a calculator that converts a factor rate into the APR it really represents - and being paid by that industry while doing so would be incompatible with writing about it honestly.

Companies we mention but earn nothing from

These appear on the site editorially. We have no direct agreement with any of them and none has paid for coverage. Because we run Skimlinks, a link to one of them may still be rewritten into a tracked affiliate link if that company is in the network.

How links are marked in the HTML

Monetized links carry rel="sponsored nofollow" and route through a /go/ redirect. Editorial references to companies carry rel="nofollow" and link directly to the company’s homepage. Citations to sources - the SBA, the FTC, state regulators - are ordinary dofollow links, because those are the links that let you check our work.

Advertising with us

We sell sponsored lender profiles, prepaid per-click placements and newsletter placement. What is not for sale: position in any ranking, removal of any accurate figure, editorial endorsement, or the appearance of independence. Rate card and contact, or write to [email protected].