Disclosure
How PepIndex is funded
We keep this plain because the whole point of the site is that you can trust what it says. PepIndex is free to read and carries no display advertising. It is funded by referrals.
Referral links
Some of the outbound links to vendors on this site are referral links. If you follow one and go on to buy something, PepIndex may earn a commission from that vendor. It costs you nothing extra — and where a vendor gives us a discount code, using it generally makes your order cheaper, not dearer.
Not every vendor has such an arrangement. When one does not, the link simply points to the vendor’s own site. Either way, the link works the same and leads to the same place.
Why it does not affect the rankings
This is the part that matters. A vendor cannot pay to rank higher, and a referral arrangement can never move a score. That is not a promise we ask you to take on trust — it is enforced in the code. The scoring function is not allowed to see whether a vendor is a partner: the affiliate field is structurally excluded from its input, and the build fails if anyone tries to pass it in.
Every score is computed only from published, sourced evidence — the testing, the certificates, the business and commercial facts recorded on each vendor’s profile — by the rubric published in full on the methodology page. If a partner vendor ranks well, it is because its documentation earned it.
Discount codes
Where a code is shown beside a vendor, it is one we have arranged for readers. We do not invent codes, and we do not show a code we have not confirmed.
Sponsored and featured vendors
The price index has one featured position: a strip above the price table, labelled Sponsored on the strip itself, and Paid placement as well when a fee is paid for it. It is the only such position on this site. It is sold by the month to any indexed vendor — terms are on the sponsor page — and it is empty at present. It has been occupied once, by Origin Labs, from 29 September to 4 October 2026, under a commission-only arrangement with no fee.
What a sponsor buys is the position: the strip, with its name, score, earned badges and link. Where the sponsor also has the referral relationship described above, PepIndex earns a commission on orders as well. The strip carries the arrangement in its own words — a fee, a commission, or both — so a reader never has to guess which.
It buys the position and nothing else. Not a score, not a rank, not a place in any price ordering, not a badge, not a mention on any other page. That is a property of the code rather than a promise about our conduct: the function that computes a score cannot receive the commercial fields at all, so an arrangement cannot reach a ranking even by mistake. The score shown on the strip is the one that vendor has everywhere else, and it moves against them as readily as for them.
The two badges a vendor can carry are earned, not included. PepIndex Verifiedis computed from the record and asks whether a vendor’s certificates are signed by a laboratory that publishes a lookup, so a reader can confirm a report without trusting the vendor or us. 21 vendors hold it as of this build; 9 of them also have a referral arrangement with this site, which the badge neither requires nor notices. Community Backed marks a vendor running a public community channel, and says on its face whether we have opened it ourselves.
A featured vendor loses the slot automatically if it is withdrawn from the index. Being featured has never been a condition of being listed, declining it has never affected a listing, and a sponsor’s score moves against them as readily as for them while they hold it.
Questions
Anything unclear about how we are funded, write to support@pepindex.org.