How we make money

TechWorth is funded by commission on some links to shops. That creates an obvious temptation to recommend whatever pays best. This page explains what stops it — and why the arrangement here is unusually awkward for us.

What an affiliate link is

A link that tells the shop you arrived from us, so they pay us a commission if you buy. It never changes what you pay. Where we use one we mark it next to the link itself, not only on this page.

The incentive points the wrong way, and we would rather say so

Refurbished sellers pay a commission several times larger than a high-street retailer pays on a new phone. Repairers mostly pay nothing at all. And the single most common correct answer in this category — keep the phone you have and put a new battery in it — earns us next to nothing.

So the answer that is right for you is frequently the answer that pays us least. Any site in this position can promise not to be swayed by that. A promise is not worth much, so we have made it a property of the software instead.

How that is enforced rather than promised

  • The engine cannot see commission. The code that decides what to recommend has no access to the commercial data at all — not the rates, not the shops, not which outcome earns anything. It is a separate part of the system that could not read it if it tried.
  • The offer comes after the decision. The recommendation is settled first. Only then does a separate step look for somewhere to buy the thing already recommended, and that step has no way to feed back into the decision.
  • A test fails the build. Our automated checks fail if the decision code ever references the commercial code, and a separate test re-runs recommendations with every commission rate altered and asserts the results do not move. If either fails, nothing ships.
  • Sometimes there is nothing to sell you. When the answer is “keep it” or “wait”, you will see no offers, because there is nothing we would honestly be sending you to buy. That is the case that costs us money, which is exactly why it is written down here.

What we will not do

  • Rank by commission, or let a shop pay for a position.
  • Invent urgency, countdowns or scarcity that does not exist.
  • Publish reviews or ratings we did not collect honestly.
  • Present our own score as a customer rating.
  • Call anything “best” without showing how we decided.
  • Show a price we have not actually observed at that shop.
  • Hide the disclosure, or put it somewhere you have to go looking for it.

What we earn today

We are a publisher on the Awin network. WeBuyAnyPhone, Envirofone and Grade Mobile have accepted us, and product pages that have a selling CTA use an affiliate link to send you to any of them for a quote. We do not have a licensed feed of their quotes, so we do not print a selling price — only a way to get one from them. They are listed alphabetically, not by what any of them pays us. Grade Mobile also sells refurbished devices; we link only to its trade-in pages. Shop listings (buy new or refurbished) still appear only when we have observed an offer from a retail programme through a licensed feed, and none is live yet.

When a further programme is accepted, this page will name it. We will not type a commission rate into this site: rates change, and a number that lives in a page rather than in a dated database row is how a stale figure gets published.

What happens when you click one

You go to the shop’s own website, and from that point their terms and their privacy policy apply rather than ours. We record that a click happened so we can tell what the site is doing; we do not send the shop your answers, and we do not store your IP address against it. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what is kept.

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Last updated: 17 September 2026