Affiliate Disclosure
Some of the links on this site earn us money. None of them change a score. Here is exactly how the arrangement works, including the parts that are inconvenient to admit.
FrameFolio is funded by affiliate commissions. Follow certain links from this site to a portfolio platform, subscribe, and the platform pays us a referral fee. You pay what you would have paid arriving directly; the fee comes out of the vendor's marketing budget.
How to tell which links pay us
Every commercial link here goes through an address beginning with /go/ — /go/squarespace, /go/pixpa, /go/smugmug and so on. Clicking one hits a redirect on this domain, which forwards you to the vendor with our referral identifier attached and records nothing about you. These links carry a sponsored attribute, marking them as commercial to search engines. Any link that does not start with /go/ earns us nothing.
The platforms that pay us nothing
This is the part most disclosure pages leave out. Several platforms we rank, and in some cases name as the best choice for a discipline, pay us nothing — no referral programme, unconfirmed terms, or no application made. They are judged by the same criteria as the ones that do pay.
The clearest example is Behance. We recommend it to graphic designers in almost every context, it is completely free, we earn nothing from it, and we do not link to it anywhere on this site. The same applies to Framer, Authory, Journo Portfolio, Clippings.me, Carbonmade and Vimeo — all named, none linked. Our advice to writers points almost entirely at tools we make no money from.
Commissions do not move scores
Scores are set against fixed criteria — image handling, client workflow, commerce terms, template quality, editorial control and price — and are not revisited to suit a payout. Commission rates in this category vary enormously; if revenue drove the rankings, the published order would look very different.
The evidence is on the pages themselves. We tell photographers that the platform ranked first has no client galleries, no proofing and no print lab. We recommend free tiers over paid plans where a free tier is sufficient, and we say plainly when a price could not be verified. None of that is what a site optimised for commission would write.
What we will not do
No paid placements, no sponsored reviews, no guest posts, no link insertions, and no advance copy sent to vendors for approval. No platform has been given the opportunity to influence its score, and none has asked twice.
If you would rather not send a referral our way, type the platform's name into a browser instead. The recommendation is identical either way. Our privacy policy covers what happens to the small amount of data these links involve.