How we make money
A site that compares where you spend and cash out real money owes you a straight answer about its own money. Here it is, written before any of it exists, so the rules are public before the first dollar arrives.
Today: this site earns nothing from the links it shows
- No affiliate links. Every "View deal" and "Sell" button is a plain link to the venue’s own listing, with no referral or tracking parameters of ours attached. We receive nothing when you buy or sell through them.
- No display ads, no sponsored posts, no paid reviews, no paid placements in any table or directory.
- No sale of user data. See the privacy policy for what little we process.
The project is currently funded by its own team as a long-term product investment.
Our own projects, disclosed
- We operate no marketplace. Steam Dashboard does not own or run any trading venue and is not affiliated with any venue we compare. Upcoming venues (for example MRKT) are tracked pre-launch in "on the radar" mode, with no rating until live data exists.
- deadlock.io is a Deadlock fan site by the same team; the Deadlock section here syncs from it. Links to it are cross-promotion between our own projects, not paid advertising.
What may change, and the rules that will apply
We plan to add disclosed affiliate links to marketplace listings: when you buy through such a link, the venue pays us a commission and your price does not change. Before the first affiliate parameter ships, all of the following will be true:
- A disclosure line sits directly above every price table that contains affiliate links, visible before you click.
- Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" markup, so the relationship is machine-readable too.
- Commissions never change the prices shown or their order: tables keep sorting by effective price and net payout, exactly as the pricing methodology describes.
- This page is updated in the same deploy, naming which venue types pay us.
Other models we may explore later — a paid data API or premium trader tools — would charge for our own product, never for placement in results.
What we never take money for
- Positions in price tables, rankings or the markets directory.
- Trust scores, review verdicts or the facts in a market dossier.
- Removing or softening negative facts about any venue.
- Anything from gambling: case-opening, jackpot, coinflip, roulette and betting sites will never be listed, reviewed, advertised or linked, at any price.