Editorial policy

Last updated 21 September 2026

brativa.online publishes commercial editorial: articles about consumer software, funded by commission on purchases readers make through partner links. That funding model creates an obvious incentive to overstate. This page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to because of it, so that you can check whether we are keeping them.

1. Who writes this site

Every article is written and signed by a named person. There is no house pseudonym and no “editorial team” byline standing in for an unnamed author.

William Baker is the director of publication and responsible editor, and is the author of the material currently published. If we commission outside contributors, they will be named on their own work, and any relationship they have with a vendor will be disclosed in the byline.

2. How we establish facts

We work from primary sources wherever one exists, and we say which one.

• Product features, tiers and bundles come from the vendor’s own current documentation or comparison pages, and are dated to the month we consulted them, because vendors repackage their ranges often.
• Regulatory and legal facts come from the regulator’s own publication — the decision, the order or the press release — and not from press coverage of it.
• Test results come from the testing laboratory that produced them. We link to the laboratory rather than quoting a figure second-hand, and we tell readers to check the date of the test round and which product tier was tested.
• Everything else is either marked as opinion or hedged in language that reflects how certain we actually are.

Sources are listed at the foot of each article with the publisher, the title and the date, so you can go and check them. Where our account and the vendor’s own published information diverge, the vendor’s own information prevails, and we say so on the page.

If we cannot verify a claim, we do one of two things: hedge it explicitly, or leave it out. We do not publish a number we have not seen at its source.

3. How this site is funded

BRANAGROUP s.r.o. earns a commission when a reader buys a product after following a partner link on this site. That commission is paid by the vendor out of the vendor’s own margin. It does not increase the price you pay, and you are never obliged to use our links — going to the vendor’s site directly costs you the same and earns us nothing.

Affiliate commission is our only revenue from this site. We do not run display advertising, we do not accept payment for placement or for a favourable verdict, we do not publish sponsored posts, and we do not collect, sell, rent or share any data about readers — the site stores nothing at all in your browser, which you can verify yourself following the instructions in the cookie policy.

Because this is the whole of our income, we disclose it in four places on every commercial page: a bar at the very top, a box immediately under the headline, a visible “Partner link” label on every button, and a note under every call to action. Commercial links additionally carry the rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" attribute so that search engines are told what they are.

4. What we refuse to do

These are absolute, and they are not subject to a commercial exception.

• No invented testimonials. We publish no reader stories, no quoted customer experiences and no case studies unless they are real, attributable and verifiable. We removed a “reader story” framing from this site’s article because the story was not one.
• No invented ratings. No star scores, no “9.4/10”, no award badges and no league tables that we did not produce from a stated, reproducible method.
• No fabricated statistics or specifications. If we cannot point to where a number came from, it does not go on the page.
• No artificial urgency. No countdown timers, no “only 3 left”, no “offer ends tonight” unless the vendor has genuinely published that deadline, no fake stock or visitor counters.
• No guaranteed-result claims. We will not say that a product will keep you safe, stop all threats, or guarantee any outcome. No such product exists.
• No impersonation. We do not present ourselves as a vendor, a news organisation, a government body or a testing laboratory, and we do not use vendor branding in a way that implies endorsement.
• No hidden commercial relationships. Every one is disclosed on the page where it applies.
• No dark patterns. No fake close buttons, no interstitials designed to be hard to dismiss, no pre-ticked anything.

5. Independence from advertisers

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any vendor named on this site, beyond the affiliate relationships disclosed on the page itself. No vendor sees an article before publication. No vendor has any right of review, approval or veto over what we write, and no affiliate agreement we enter into will be allowed to create one.

The practical test of this is whether negative material survives. On this site it does: the article about Avast contains a full section on the 2024 United States Federal Trade Commission order over the sale of browsing data, and a correction notice about a feature the vendor no longer offers. Both were written while the affiliate relationship was in place, and both stayed in. If you ever find that our coverage of a product contains nothing a reasonable buyer would consider a drawback, treat that as a failure of this policy and tell us.

If we ever ceased to be independent — if a vendor acquired an interest in us, or paid for placement — we would say so at the top of the affected pages, in the same place as the partner-link disclosure.

6. Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, we fix it in the open.

1. Tell us. Email info@brativa.online with the page, the passage and, if you have one, the source that contradicts it. You do not need to explain who you are.
2. We acknowledge. We aim to reply within five working days.
3. We check it against a primary source — the vendor’s documentation, the regulator’s publication, the laboratory’s report.
4. If we were wrong, we correct the text and record the correction. Substantive corrections — anything that could change a reader’s decision — are listed in a visible corrections section on the article itself, stating what we previously said and why it was wrong. We do not delete an error quietly. The article on this site carries such a section listing seven corrections made to an earlier version.
5. Typographical fixes that change no meaning are made without a notice.
6. The “last reviewed” date at the top of each article is updated whenever we revisit it.

If you believe we have been unfair to you or to a product you are responsible for, write to the same address. A right of reply on the page itself is available where the criticism was of a named party.

7. Disclosure about how articles are produced

Research tools, including automated ones, may be used in drafting. Every factual claim that survives into a published article has been checked against the source cited for it, and the named author is responsible for the whole of the published text. Automated assistance is never a defence for an error; the byline is.

8. Readers

We collect nothing about you. No cookies, no analytics, no pixels, no fingerprinting, no browser storage, no third-party requests of any kind. We do not know who reads this site and we prefer it that way. See the privacy policy for the one exception — standard server logs — and what happens to it.