How this site makes money

The whole ledger, in one box

Starlink, not us, decides who qualifies. In short, from its help center and referral terms:

• You’ve never held a Starlink subscription, now or in the past.
• Your service address sits in the referrer’s country, which on this site means the US.
• The kit and the plan are both bought on starlink.com; a store or a private hand-over doesn’t qualify.
• Service on any Roam tier (100GB, 300GB, Unlimited) or Residential tier (100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, Max, or the retired Residential and Residential Lite) must stay paid up, with no lapse, across two whole billing cycles.

By default the reward is account credit unless you choose otherwise, which Starlink subtracts from the next invoice. Where Starlink offers it, you can have the reward paid through Stripe to a bank account you link, rather than as credit. Starlink can change the amount or end the program, so read every mention here as “if you qualify”.

Two catches. An order placed without the link, through a different person’s link, or at a retail store never shows the referral, and Starlink won’t attach it afterward. And Starlink’s referral terms require buying the kit and the service on starlink.com itself, and nothing in the terms or the help center settles whether a rental-kit order qualifies, which is why we link the credit to the plan alone and never present a rented kit as earning it. The year-one page shows where the credit lands.

What the reward can and can’t touch

When the cheapest answer pays us nothing, it still wins. Starlink’s retailer page names 16 US chains that stock its kits, Walmart and Amazon among them, and a kit from any of them earns no referral reward, yet if a store price is lower we print it. The cheapest kit page does exactly that.

Pages with the link, and pages without

The link sits only on the home page and on pages where you’re choosing what to buy: in the header button, one box near the end of the page (always after a short “skip the order if…” list), a slim bar on phones and a pop-up shown once per browser. On the home page the calculator’s result has one too. Each carries a referral-link line beside it.

The price history is a record, so it has no button; neither do this page, the other trust pages or the legal pages. The build itself enforces that, rather than a script hiding buttons afterward.

Money we turn down

• Ads. No search, social or display ads point at the referral link, directly or through this site. Starlink’s terms forbid it, and we wouldn’t anyway.
• Paid mentions. No one pays to be named, ranked or reviewed, and there are no sponsored posts.
• Store commissions. Any link to Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot or another store is a plain link that pays nothing.
• Lists. No email sign-up, no messages, and no asking readers to share the link.

What a click records

When Google Analytics is switched on, each click on a referral button sends one event, referral_click, with:

• the placement (for example “header” or the box at the end of a page);
• the page group (home, plans, kit or deals);
• on the calculator’s result button only: the result plan id, a budget bucket (under $50, $50 to $80, or $80 and up a month) and whether you chose home or travel.

The state you pick, any address and anything else you type are never sent. The one-time pop-up also logs that it was shown, with the page path. The privacy policy has the rest.