Affiliate Disclosure

This is our affiliate disclosure: a plain-English explanation of how matched.ie is funded, so you know exactly where we stand before you act on anything we recommend. We think you deserve that up front — no small print, no games.

What an affiliate link is

Some of the links on matched.ie — mainly the buttons that take you to a provider’s own website, such as a VPN’s sign-up page — are affiliate links. If you click one and then subscribe or buy, the provider pays us a small commission for sending you their way.

Crucially, this costs you nothing extra. You pay exactly the same price you would by going to the provider directly — and sometimes less, because some of our links carry an exclusive discount. The commission comes out of the provider’s marketing budget, not your pocket.

How this keeps the site free

Running matched.ie costs money — testing products, tracking prices, and writing and maintaining the guides. Affiliate commissions are how we cover that, instead of plastering the site with intrusive ads, hiding our best advice behind a paywall, or selling your personal data. It’s the model that lets us stay free to read and, just as importantly, independent.

Our promise: a commission never buys a ranking

This is the line that matters most, so we’ll be blunt about it. No company can pay us for a better ranking, a higher score, or a place on a list. Our rankings come from our tests and our data — the same figures you see on every page — and nothing else moves them.

We prove it in what we publish:

• We tell you when something is free — that the Six Nations is free-to-air, or that a service you were about to pay for costs nothing.
• We point you to the official route even when it pays us nothing — like GAA+ being the proper way to follow the GAA abroad.
• We’ll say a cheaper plan is the better buy even when a pricier one would earn us more.
• We keep weak products clearly marked as “not recommended” — we don’t soften the warning just because a click might earn a few cent.

How we decide what to recommend

Our full editorial process is set out on our how we test page. In short: we judge every product against measurable criteria, score it, and rank it — for Irish users, in euro, against the rules that apply here. The commission a provider offers is not one of those criteria, and it never will be.

Which links are — and aren’t — affiliate links

To be clear about where money is and isn’t involved:

• May be affiliate links: outbound buttons and links that take you to a provider’s own website to sign up or buy (on matched.ie these often go through a tidy /go/ link).
• Never affiliate links: links to other pages on matched.ie, and links to broadcasters, regulators, audit reports, court records and other sources we cite. Those are there purely to inform you.

A good rule of thumb: a “Visit site” or “Get provider” button may earn us a commission; an in-text link to a source or another one of our guides does not.

You’re never obliged to use our links

You can always go straight to a provider’s website yourself — nothing on matched.ie is gated behind our links, and you lose nothing by not using them. If you do use them, thank you: it’s what keeps the site free and independent, and it costs you nothing.

Standards and the law

We follow the Irish and EU rules on advertising and consumer protection — including the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) code and EU consumer-protection law — which require clear disclosure of commercial relationships. This page is exactly that. Any sponsored content, if we ever run it, is labelled unmistakably; to date, our rankings and reviews are editorial, not paid placements.

Questions or a correction?

If anything here is unclear, or you feel we’ve fallen short of it, tell us. You can reach the team through our contact page — we read everything, and we fix what we get wrong.