How we make money

Affiliate commission, disclosed in full. Here is exactly who pays us and what we do about the obvious conflict of interest.

The short version

Some links to software on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the vendor pays us a percentage of what you pay them. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same either way.

Who pays us

• Leavo — 35% 36-month recurring (lifetime at Platinum: 50+ paid referrals) , 90-day attribution window.
• Gusto — $100 one-time bounty , 120-day attribution window.
• Deel — up to $1,500 per new paying customer ($500 sales-qualified + $1,000 on close) .

We also recommend tools that pay us nothing when they are the right answer: BambooHR. And on our software page we make the case for using no software at all if you are a small team in a single state — which is the recommendation that costs us the most money.

The rules we hold ourselves to

• Disclosure goes above the link, not below it. The FTC requires it to be clear and conspicuous. Footer-only disclosure does not meet that bar.
• Rankings are set before commercial terms are checked. "Best for" is assigned from test results, and the highest-paying program is not the default recommendation.
• Every affiliate link is tagged rel="sponsored", as Google asks. We do not pass ranking signals we were paid for.
• We publish limitations. Every tool review lists what the product is bad at, including the ones that pay us.
• No paid placement, ever. A vendor cannot buy a position, a verdict, or a change to a review. Nobody has an advance look at what we publish about them.

Why this model, honestly

Reference content like the state law tables costs real time to maintain and earns nothing directly. Affiliate commission on the software pages is what funds it. The alternative models — selling ads against legal content, or charging for access — would both make the reference material worse.

The conflict is real and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The mitigation is that every claim we make is checkable: the state guidance is linked, the test policy is published, and the reasoning is on the page. Read the methodology.