Qualified referrals
A vendor may pay for a disclosed demo or RFP referral. The disclosure appears at the point of influence and does not change directory order.
Editorial and commercial disclosures
The answer and evidence status come before monetization. Paid relationships cannot buy rankings, evidence grades, reviews or the removal of accurate limitations.
Premium factual profiles
Providers may fund expanded factual data collection or media. Required fields, sources and editorial conclusions remain controlled by the publisher.
Reviews
Dealer and role verification, store context, version and relationship disclosure are required. Incentivized sentiment is not accepted as independent evidence.
Advisory work
Dealer consulting and implementation services are contracted separately from editorial scoring and cannot alter published evidence.
Publisher affiliation
This directory is published by Carbide Digital, which also appears in it as a listed company. That record is marked with an affiliation disclosure wherever it appears as a result, its evidence status was set by the same standard applied to every other record, and directory order remains alphabetical. The affiliation does not confer a higher evidence grade, a ranking or a recommendation.
Why the affiliation is disclosed on every page, not one
The rule that applies is 16 CFR Part 255, on material connections. It is not about grades — it says that where there is a relationship a reader would not expect, the connection must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously at the point of influence. A directory published by a company listed inside it is exactly that relationship. When this was measured, the publisher appeared on 57 indexable pages and the disclosure appeared on one. It now renders as a badge in every list context and as a full callout on the company record, its product records, every comparison where either side is affiliated, and the alternatives page.
What the publisher's own record was not given
No higher evidence grade, no position, no exemption. Its evidence packet was built to the same standard as the other forty-nine — identity and published scope confirmed against the company's own site on a stated date — and it is subject to the same corrections policy as every other record. Directory order is alphabetical everywhere it is not driven by a stated criterion, so there is no ordering to buy.
What is not sold here, in plain terms
Position in any list. Evidence status. Inclusion or exclusion. Removal of a limitation. The wording of a comparison. Presence in an answer. If a future commercial arrangement ever touched any of those, it would be disclosed on this page before it launched, dated in the change log, and marked at the point it appeared.
Why the possible arrangements are listed even though none is running
Naming what could be sold, and what it still could not buy, is a stronger control than saying nothing until something launches. It fixes the boundary in advance, in public, where a reader can hold it to account — rather than leaving a first commercial relationship to be defined at the moment it becomes profitable to define it loosely.
How to raise a concern about any of this
Write to the correction address with the page URL. A disclosure that is missing where it should appear is a defect in this site and is treated as one, not as a matter of interpretation.