How we make money

A directory that recommends shops should say who pays it. Here is ours, as of September 2026.

Where the money comes from

• Featured placement. A shop can pay to be shown more prominently — higher on a city page, or on the homepage. Anything paid for is marked as such where it appears.
• Leads. Where a shop wants enquiries sent to it directly, we can charge for that connection.

That is the whole list. It is all store-side. Readers pay nothing and are asked for nothing.

Where it does not come from

• Not from you. There is no subscription, no paywall, no account, nothing to buy. We are not a shop and we never will be — if you need a drill bit, you buy it at the counter of a shop on this list, and we take nothing from that sale.
• Not from affiliate links. We do not earn a cut of anything you buy, online or in person. There are no affiliate links on this site.
• Not from advertising networks. We do not run third-party ad slots and we do not sell reader data. See privacy.

What paying for placement cannot buy

This is the part that matters, so it is stated plainly:

• It cannot buy a listing. A shop gets listed because we checked it, in a city we have opened. Paying does not skip that, and no amount of money puts a shop on this site before someone from our team has been to it.
• It cannot change the rating. Ratings and review counts are Google's, shown as we found them, for paying and non-paying shops alike.
• It cannot change the note. The one or two sentences we write about a shop are ours. A featured shop with 3.7 stars gets a note that says 3.7 is low for this list. A paying shop does not get a warmer write-up than the shop next door that pays nothing.
• It cannot get a competitor removed or buried. Listings come down for the reasons on our method page, and money is not one of them.

Why we are strict about this

The only thing this directory has going for it is that someone actually went and looked. The moment a paid listing quietly gets a better write-up than an unpaid one, the notes stop meaning anything and there is no reason to use this site over a map pin. We would rather earn less than be a site whose recommendations you have to second-guess.

Ask us

If you think something on this site reads like it was bought, tell us —hello@seekhardware.net. Store owners who want to talk about featured placement can use the same address; the details are oncontact.