How this site earns, and what it turned down
Three companies pay this site a share if you buy after following a link from it. Two programmes that were available were not taken. The free options named throughout pay nothing and are still named first.
This site is paid by three companies when a reader buys something after following a link from it. Those links are marked as paid wherever they appear, they carry rel="sponsored nofollow", and they pass through /go/ so that every one of them is listed in one place rather than scattered through the prose.
The three
| Partner | Why it is here | Which pages carry it |
|---|---|---|
| Coursera | It carries the Google IT Support Professional Certificate, a real alternative first step | The certificate comparison, and the page on choosing a first certification |
| Udemy | Its CompTIA A+ topic page demonstrably lists Core 1 and Core 2 courses for the current version | The A+ page, the study guide, and the practice-test page |
| Pluralsight | A search of its own catalogue returned Network+ and Tech+ paths | The Network+ page only |
No rate, cookie length or commission figure is published here for any of them, because none of those terms has been verified by this site inside the programme itself. Quoting a commission we cannot check would break the same rule that keeps a borrowed exam fee off the site.
What was turned down
Whizlabs
Available to this site on one condition: that its catalogue actually carried the exam being written about. On 24 September 2026 its CompTIA A+ product address returned a not-found page and the word CompTIA did not appear on its home page at all, whose categories are cloud, DevOps, cyber security, Microsoft and Java. The condition was not met, so no link exists.
CompTIA
There is no CompTIA link on this site and there will not be one. CompTIA is the certifying body whose pages this site quotes on every page, and being paid by the organisation you are citing as an authority is a conflict that no disclosure line repairs. Its pages are cited, dated, and linked to nothing.
The free things, which pay nothing
Two resources are recommended more often on this site than any paid one, and neither earns it anything. CompTIA's exam objectives, which are the specification the exam is written against and are given away for an email address — the download links sit on CompTIA's A+ Core 1 page. And Professor Messer's free A+ videos, which this site has no commercial relationship with of any kind.
Both are named before the paid options on every page where all three appear. That ordering is deliberate and it is the easiest thing to check on the whole site.
The rules this site works to
- A payout never decides whether something is recommended, or in what order.
- A paid link is disclosed beside itself, not only in a line at the top of the page.
- No partner sees a page before it is published, and none has been asked to.
- No commission figure is printed unless it was verified on the programme's own terms.
- No coupon or promotional-code page exists here, and none will.
- A refusal published on this page is published. Reversing one means rewriting this page first, in public, with the reason.
If that arrangement bothers you
Then ignore the three links. Everything factual on this site — the exam details, the pass marks, the domain weightings, the renewal rules, the retake policy — came off CompTIA's own pages and is reproduced with the address and the date, so you can check all of it without following anything that pays us. That is the intended use. How the facts are sourced.