Who writes this, and the rules it follows

The rule the whole site runs on

Every exam fee, time limit, question count, eligibility note and retirement date on Stackrung comes from the certifying body’s own page — AWS, Microsoft or Google — and carries the date it was read. Currently that date is 24 September 2026 across the site.

Nothing is taken from a training provider’s blog, a forum thread or another affiliate site. Nothing is converted between currencies, because a converted price is an estimate that looks like a fact. And when the source is silent, so are we: Microsoft does not publish a dollar price for the AZ-900 exam, so no Azure exam price appears anywhere on this site, in any currency.

What we will not publish

Three categories, permanently.

Pass rates. AWS publishes none. Any figure claiming one is a guess, and repeating it would make this site the fourth link in a chain that started with somebody’s impression.

Salary and hiring outcomes. The cloud-certification salary surveys quoted everywhere are published by companies that sell training for those certifications. Unless the certifying body or the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a figure, we do not print it — and neither of them publishes one for these exams.

Exam content. No questions, no dumps, no links to them. AWS’s own published position is that accessing that material violates the agreement you sign at registration, with sanctions up to revoking certifications already earned. We take that seriously on your behalf.

How we score an exam

Some pages carry a score out of ten. It rates the exam as a purchase, never your chances of passing it, and it is built from five things we can check on the issuer’s page:

1. Price against what it certifies — the fee measured against the breadth of the credential.
2. How long it lasts — validity, renewal cost, and whether a free renewal route exists.
3. How much preparation is free — what the issuer gives away versus what it sells.
4. How precisely the audience is defined — vague recommended experience costs points, because it produces expensive mistakes.
5. Version stability — an exam with a published retirement date is a worse purchase this quarter than one without.

No score on this site reflects an outcome, a salary or a hiring result, because we have no evidence about any of those.

Words we use carefully

A certification is issued by a body that sets an exam — what AWS, Microsoft and Google issue here. A certificate of completion says you finished a course, which is a different claim. Accredited means a recognised accrediting body has assessed the programme, and we only use it where the issuer’s own page does.

Microsoft’s Azure Fundamentals page says a pass “may” make you eligible for ACE college credit, and links its own page on it; nothing on the AWS pages we read makes a comparable claim. That distinction is the sort of thing this site exists to keep straight.

How we earn

Some links to training providers are paid placements, marked sponsored and nofollow. AWS, Microsoft and Google pay us nothing, and their free training — AWS Skill Builder’s free tier, Microsoft Learn, Google’s GEAR credits — is recommended first on every page where it is the right answer.

No provider has ever been given a ranking, a mention or a kind sentence in exchange for money, and no provider sees a page before it is published. The full accounting is on how this site earns.

Corrections

If a fee has changed, an exam has moved or a date has passed, write to us and we will fix it and re-date the page. Corrections that name the source page get done fastest. The contact page has the address.