How this desk is paid — and the conflict it creates

Some links on this site earn money. This page says exactly which, exactly how, and — the part that matters more — what this desk has refused to do to earn more of it.

The plain version

Follow a partner link from Syllabuy, buy something at the other end, and the seller pays this desk a share of what you paid. You pay the seller's own price; this site has no mechanism to change it and no access to a better one.

Partner links carry rel="sponsored nofollow" and run through /go/ on this domain. They are labelled in the place where they appear, not only here. Search engines are told not to crawl /go/.

Who pays, and on what terms

Where a programme's terms could be confirmed, here they are.

• Coursera and Coursera Plus — one programme, run through Impact, paying a band of 15-45%, on a 30-day cookie. Subscriptions are commissioned on the first transaction only, which is why an annual subscription is worth considerably more to this desk than a monthly one. Degrees and MasterTrack purchases are excluded from commission entirely.
• Udemy — Impact, 10% baseline, on a 7-day cookie. Free courses, subscriptions and purchases made with unapproved coupon codes earn nothing.
• edX — Impact, 10% for content publishers and 5% for coupon and discount sites, on a 60-day cookie. The programme prohibits promoting Master's degrees and boot camps.
• Alison — an in-house programme paying 20% of the revenue a new learner generates for 12 months after registration.
• FutureLearn — an in-house partner portal paying up to 20%, with applications reviewed and some rejected.
• LinkedIn Learning — no confirmed terms. The rates circulating for it come from third-party directories that contradict one another, and no official rate card could be read. The link is disclosed and swappable; no commission figure for it is stated anywhere on this site.

Those terms come from the programmes' own pages where one could be read, checked in September 2026. They change without notice, and none of them was negotiated specially for this site.

The conflict, stated rather than denied

Coursera's structure creates a real pull on this desk. An annual Coursera Plus subscription is by a distance the largest single payment available here, and a monthly one is worth a fraction of it, because Coursera commissions subscriptions on the first transaction only.

That is precisely the recommendation the money page hedges against, and it does so on purpose: it tells readers who have not finished an online course before to buy monthly rather than annually, which is the advice that costs this desk the most money. If you ever find a page here steering you towards the annual plan without that caveat attached, the page is wrong and worth writing in about.

What this site will not do for money

These are commitments, not preferences. Reversing one means rewriting this page first.

No coupon or promo-code pages. Udemy voids purchases made with unapproved codes, so a coupon page would be advice that costs the reader their purchase. Coupon pages are also the thinnest kind of affiliate content there is.

No rating for a product whose price cannot be read. LinkedIn Learning is covered here and carries no score and no verdict, because its subscription price sits behind a sign-in. A rating implies a value judgement, and a value judgement requires knowing the price.

No invented outcomes. No completion rates, pass rates, salaries or job-placement figures appear on this site unless a named official source published them and the page says who and when. Nothing sells a course like a number, which is exactly why an unsourced one has no place here.

No hiding the free route. Auditing, Coursera's Financial Aid, edX's audit track, Alison's free Learner Record and LinkedIn Learning through a public library all pay this desk nothing, and all of them are recommended on the pages where they are the better answer. A page that only mentions free options after exhausting the paid ones is an advert with footnotes.

No payment for placement. Nobody can buy a position, a score, a mention or a kinder sentence here.

If this ever stops being true

The test is simple and you can apply it yourself: does the site still tell people to buy monthly when they probably will not finish, and does it still name the free route first? If those two stop being true, stop trusting the rest of it.

Questions go to [email protected].