How We Make Money
Where Up The Gains’ revenue comes from, and why that does not change what we write about a product.
We think you should know how a website pays its bills before you trust its reviews. This page lays out how Up The Gains earns money and the wall between revenue and editorial.
How Up The Gains is funded
Up The Gains is funded mainly by affiliate commission. When a reader clicks through to a provider from one of our articles and opens an account, the provider may pay us a referral fee. That fee comes out of the provider’s marketing budget. It does not cost you anything, and it does not change the rate, fee, or terms you get.
Affiliate partnerships
We earn affiliate commission across several categories of financial product, including:
- Investing platforms and stocks and shares ISAs
- Savings apps and cash savings accounts
- Robo-advisers and managed portfolios
- Mortgage brokers and remortgage services
- Pension consolidation and SIPP providers
- Budgeting and money management apps
We do not earn commission on every link or every provider. Some products we cover have no affiliate programme, and we still write about them when they are worth writing about. Outbound links to ONS, HMRC, gov.uk, the FCA, and similar reference sources are never paid.
Our relationship with Gains App
Gains App is a UK budgeting and cashback app that Up The Gains co-founded and launched in 2025. We have a direct financial interest in its success, which makes it the strongest conflict of interest anywhere on this site.
We treat that openly with four rules.
- We add a clear disclosure of the relationship in any article that mentions Gains App, placed where it makes sense in the piece.
- In any comparison or roundup, Gains App is labelled as ours and is included only when it genuinely fits the brief.
- We apply the same fact-checking and figure-sourcing standards to Gains App coverage as we do to any rival product.
- We do not run paid promotion for Gains App on this site. Mentions are organic cross-promotion between the two businesses rather than paid placements.
Editorial independence
This is the bit that matters. Being a commercial partner does not buy a positive review on Up The Gains. Our editorial team decides what gets covered, what gets praised, and what gets criticised. Providers do not see our reviews before publication and do not have approval over what we say.
If a product we are partnered with has high fees, poor customer service, weak investor protections, or a feature that is genuinely worse than a competitor, we say so. We have flagged concerns about partners’ products in the past and will keep doing it. Readers come back when reviews are honest. They do not come back when reviews are bought.
Sponsored content
Occasionally a brand pays us for a piece of content, a campaign, or a placement. When that happens, the content is clearly labelled as sponsored or paid partnership. This is separate from affiliate links inside an editorial review.
Sponsored content still has to meet our editorial standards. We turn down sponsorship work that we cannot stand behind.
Why we disclose
The FCA expects firms in the financial promotions space to be clear with consumers about commercial relationships. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) expects the same on the advertising side. Both sets of rules exist for the right reason: you deserve to know who is paying whom.
Beyond the rulebook, transparency is just the right way to run a media brand. If you are going to trust us with decisions about your money, you should know exactly how we earn ours.