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By Daniel Brenner, Senior Editor Updated 2026-05-18 How we rate →

Affiliate Disclosure

Full disclosure, in plain English: CrowdIndex earns commissions when readers sign up to peer-to-peer (P2P) investment platforms through links on our site. We earn nothing if you do not sign up. The platforms we recommend pay us between approximately €10 and €100 per qualifying signup. These commissions do not change our editorial ranking — see “How this affects our ranking” below for what that means in practice.

What is an affiliate relationship

An “affiliate relationship” is a commercial arrangement in which a publisher (us) sends readers to a service provider (a P2P platform) and is paid a commission when those readers sign up and complete certain qualifying actions — typically a first deposit, sometimes a minimum investment, sometimes simply a verified account.

Affiliate relationships are standard practice in online financial publishing — NerdWallet, Bankrate, Investopedia, and most major financial review sites use them. The relationship lets the publisher fund editorial work without charging readers directly.

The risk in this model is that the publisher’s commercial interest (sign more readers up) gets mixed up with the editorial interest (give readers honest analysis). The protection is disclosure — clearly telling readers about the commercial relationship — and editorial firewall — keeping the commercial side away from the ranking decisions.

This page is our disclosure. Our methodology page describes our editorial firewall.

Which platforms we have affiliate relationships with

CrowdIndex currently has affiliate relationships with most of the 19 platforms we review. Each platform’s review is marked with an inline disclosure noting whether we have a commercial relationship with that specific platform.

As a working list (subject to change as platforms update their affiliate terms):

  • Tier 1 and Tier 2 platforms — we have or are establishing affiliate relationships with Maclear, Mintos, PeerBerry, InRento, Robocash, Nectaro, Capitalia, Indemo, Crowdpear, EstateGuru, Profitus, InSoil, Lendermarket, and Twino. Commission ranges typically €10 to €100 per qualifying signup, with some platforms also offering a small ongoing revenue share on investor activity for the first 6-12 months.
  • Tier 3 platforms (Hive5, Scramble) — affiliate relationship varies; we may or may not have one. Where we do, commissions are typical industry rates.
  • Tier 4 platforms (Debitum, Reinvest24, Loanch) — we have no current affiliate relationship with these platforms. We cover them as cautionary case studies. We earn zero commission from anything published about them.

The current per-platform commercial status is shown in each individual platform review, in the disclosure box that appears below the affiliate call-to-action.

How affiliate commissions work

When you click an affiliate link on CrowdIndex (any link that goes through crowdindex.org/go/{platform-slug} or that has the rel="sponsored" attribute), your click is tagged with our partner ID at the destination platform. If you complete the platform’s qualifying action — typically registration plus a first deposit of any amount, sometimes registration plus an identity check — the platform credits our partner ID and pays us a commission.

The size of the commission varies by platform. Typical ranges:

  • €10 to €25 — small consumer-lending platforms with low average deposits
  • €25 to €50 — most mainstream EU P2P platforms
  • €50 to €100 — platforms that target higher-net-worth investors or use volume-based commission tiers
  • Plus ongoing revenue share — a few platforms also pay a small percentage of investor activity for the first 6 or 12 months after signup

Commissions are paid to CrowdIndex’s operating entity, not to individual editors or reviewers. No individual on the editorial team is paid more or less based on which platforms generate sign-ups.

How this affects our ranking

It does not. We mean this literally:

  • Our ranking is set editorially, based on the dimensions described in our methodology page — regulatory cover, default track record, concentration risk, yield consistency, audit transparency, multilingual access, and independent media coverage.
  • The editorial framework is set before commercial negotiation, not after. The list of platforms we would rank above 8.0 was built from research evidence before we approached any platform for an affiliate offer.
  • We have rejected affiliate offers from platforms we cannot rank highly. Several lower-tier platforms have approached us with commission rates that would have been commercially attractive. We declined where the platform’s editorial position would have been Tier 3 or Tier 4 on our Trusted-Platforms framework.
  • We cover platforms where we earn zero commission. Tier 4 platforms — Debitum, Reinvest24, Loanch — are reviewed in full despite no commercial relationship. We cover them because readers researching the EU P2P sector need to know about these platforms, and we believe the editorial value of cautionary case studies is part of what makes our other recommendations credible.

If we ever had a commercial reason to soften a negative review or harden a positive one against our editorial judgement, that would damage the credibility of every other review on the site. The editorial firewall is not altruism — it is the entire commercial logic of the publication.

What affiliate commissions do affect

To be fully honest about what the commercial side does change:

  • The depth of research we can fund. Affiliate revenue pays for editorial salaries, dossier research, source verification, and translation work. Without it, this site would not exist as more than a hobby.
  • Which platforms are visually featured on the home page. Our home-page hero is a single Editor’s Pick. We have explained on our methodology page why Maclear is currently #1. That ranking is editorial. But our visual placement of the Editor’s Pick — the prominent box, the hero CTA — is also commercially convenient because Maclear has a healthy affiliate programme. We do not pretend these two facts are unrelated. The ranking is editorial, and the visual presentation acknowledges both editorial judgement and the realities of a commercially-supported publication.
  • How quickly we can scale to new platforms. Adding Bondora and Income Marketplace to our coverage (planned post-launch) is partly an editorial decision and partly a question of commercial signal — both platforms run sizeable affiliate programmes, and both are worth covering on the merits.

We tell you this because it is honest. Other rating sites in this sector typically do not.

Our editorial firewall — the operational rules

Specifically, the editorial firewall means:

  1. The editorial team sets the platform list and the scoring framework. The commercial team (when there is a commercial team — currently it is one person) does not.
  2. The dossier research happens before any commercial conversation. We do not look at commission rates while we are deciding what to write.
  3. We decline affiliate offers that would require editorial concessions. Some platforms have approached us with terms requiring approval of review copy before publication, or removal of “Things to Watch” sections, or favourable comparison placement. We decline these terms.
  4. We publish corrections regardless of commercial relationship. A fact-correction that lowers a score on a Tier 1 affiliate partner is processed the same way as a fact-correction on a Tier 4 platform with no affiliate relationship. The commercial side does not get vetoes.

If you suspect we have failed to live up to these rules on a specific review, please contact us. If you have credible evidence of a violation, we will publish it publicly.

Platforms we earn zero commission from

For full transparency: we currently earn zero affiliate commission from coverage of:

  • Debitum — Tier 4, no affiliate relationship. Our review references the March 2026 Karsten Aichholz investigation findings and Northern Finance’s 93/100 paid affiliate review during the same period.
  • Reinvest24 — Tier 4, no affiliate relationship. Our review references the three regulator alerts (EFSA Estonia January 2024, CNMV Spain blacklist, Finanstilsynet Norway June 2025) and the frozen withdrawals situation.
  • Loanch — Tier 4, no affiliate relationship. Our review references the Fingular Group / Cashwagon CEO history and the investigative cluster (Rozsliduvach, MiceTimes, Mothership.sg, Crime.Hab) on Russia-laundering patterns.

Coverage of these platforms is editorial only. We believe it is part of what makes the rest of our recommendations meaningful.

Every affiliate link on CrowdIndex carries the rel="sponsored nofollow" attribute as required by Google’s webmaster guidelines for paid links. The redirect path crowdindex.org/go/{platform-slug} is blocked from search-engine crawlers via robots.txt — this protects the platforms from any accidental crawl-signal manipulation through our outbound links.

The direct internal links from one review to another (e.g., the “Compare to Mintos” link inside the Maclear review) are standard editorial links — they carry no sponsored tag because they are not affiliate links.

If you ever encounter a CrowdIndex link to a P2P platform that does NOT carry a sponsored tag, please let us know — it would be a bug. Email: editorial@crowdindex.org

How to use our reviews critically

A short reader’s guide for getting honest value from a commercially-supported review site:

  • Read the “Things to Watch” section of every review, not just the “Strengths” — that is where we put the documented risks
  • Compare two reviews side by side before deciding. Our 19 reviews use the same 10-section structure exactly because we want side-by-side comparison to be possible
  • Look at where a platform is not mentioned. A platform absent from “Safest P2P Lending Platforms 2026” is absent for editorial reasons
  • Check the “Last updated” date. If a review is more than a quarter old, weight it less — the underlying situation may have changed
  • Email us if something looks off. Honest critique helps us improve

More information