Who pays us, who does not, and what we refused

The short version

A handful of links on this site go to training providers through partner programmes, and may pay Stackrung a commission if you buy something. Every one of them is tagged sponsored nofollow, goes through an address beginning /go/, and carries a line of plain text near it saying what it is.

No payment has ever bought a mention, a ranking or a sentence. Nothing on this site is a review we were paid to write, and no provider reads a page before you do.

Who pays us nothing

AWS, Microsoft and Google. None of them runs an affiliate programme we could verify, and we would not route their pages through a partner link even if they did — they are the sources this site quotes, and a source you are paid to send traffic to is not a source. Every link to an exam page here is a plain link.

Their free training. AWS Skill Builder’s free tier, Microsoft Learn’s modules and Google’s GEAR credits pay us nothing at all, and they are the first recommendation on every page where they are the right answer. On a foundational exam, that is most of the time. A site that earns from training has an obvious incentive not to tell you the free material is enough, so we say it as often as it is true.

Who might pay us

Six training providers: Whizlabs, KnowledgeHut, Simplilearn, Edureka, Coursera and Udemy. Where one of them appears as a /go/ link, that link may earn us a commission.

We name them for what they are. Question banks are the paid category we think is most often worth the money, because format rehearsal is what actually fails candidates. Instructor-led courses cost several times the exam fee and make sense mainly when an employer is paying. Udemy’s affiliate terms are among the weakest in the industry, and we would rather you knew that than assumed the link was neutral.

No commission rate appears anywhere on this site, on any page, including this one. We hold those figures internally, several of them are third-party and unverified, and quoting them would only invite you to guess at our motives from numbers we cannot stand behind.

What we refused

Pluralsight — which absorbed A Cloud Guru, the best-known cloud-training brand of the last decade — is not linked anywhere on this site as a partner. Its affiliate page at pluralsight.com/affiliates returned a 404 when we checked it on 24 September 2026, and the only commercial terms available come from third-party directories that disagree with each other. We do not key a programme whose terms we cannot read at the source, so Pluralsight gets no partner link here until that changes.

Exam dumps, question banks claiming “real exam questions”, and anyone selling guaranteed passes. These are not a matter of taste. AWS’s own published rules say sharing or accessing real exam content violates the AWS Certification Program Agreement, with sanctions up to revoking certifications already issued. No amount of commission is worth sending a reader there, and no future change of policy will reverse this one.

Coupon and promotion-code pages. Several training providers void purchases made with unapproved codes, and pages built around them are thin work that ages badly. We do not run them.

What you should assume

Assume that any link to a training provider might pay us, and that no link to AWS, Microsoft or Google ever does. Assume the free option is named on the page because it deserves to be, since it earns us nothing.

And check the price yourself before you pay. Training prices move constantly, promotional pricing is close to permanent in this market, and the only prices this site stands behind are the exam fees on the certification path — because those come from the people who charge them.

If any of this stops being true, this page changes before the links do. Write to [email protected] if you spot otherwise.