/var/log/tuxtone · site economics

Free as in "nobody pays us"

~/blog/free-as-in-nobody-pays-us

By the TuxTone crew · Posted 2026-09-20

Here is the complete list of things on this site that can earn us money: Krisp. That's it. One product, one affiliate relationship, confined to one page and a labelled box on the stack guide. And the joke — the genuinely good joke at our expense — is that Krisp has no Linux desktop application. The only product that could pay us doesn't run on the operating system this entire site is about.

Everything else we recommend is free software with no affiliate programme in existence: EasyEffects, RNNoise, PipeWire, NoiseTorch, the RNNoise LADSPA plugin, OBS Studio, ffmpeg, SoX. Not "we chose not to join their programme" — there is no programme. There is no commission on sudo pacman -S easyeffects. There never will be.

Why publish this at all

Because you should be suspicious of sites in this niche, and the most useful thing we can hand you is the shape of our incentives so you can audit our advice against them.

Affiliate economics quietly bend content in three predictable directions, and once you can name them you'll see them everywhere:

1. The free option gets a polite paragraph, the paid option gets the guide. Not by lying — by allocating effort. Nine hundred words of loving setup instructions for the product with a commission, and "there are also some open-source options" for the thing that would have solved your problem.
2. Limitations migrate to the bottom. A meaningful caveat — no Linux build, a daily cap, a dead upstream — appears, but in the last section, after the buttons.
3. Rankings acquire a suspicious correlation. The order of a "best tools" list matches the order of the commission rates, and the stated criteria are vague enough that nobody can check.

We designed this site's structure specifically against those three. The longest, most detailed pages here are for software that pays nothing. The "there is no Linux app" fact is the first sentence of our Krisp page, not a footnote. And our rankings come from a published scoring script whose inputs are release dates and package databases — checkable facts, computed in code we ship with the site, so you can disagree with our weights rather than guess at our motives.

So why link a paid product at all?

Because omitting it would be its own distortion. A real fraction of Linux users also sit in front of a work-issued Windows laptop or a client's Mac, and on those machines the open-source stack isn't available to them. Pretending that need doesn't exist would be ideology, not information. So we cover it, in one box, with the price and the date on it, aimed only at people whose situation actually fits.

We also refuse a few things that would pay better. We don't review paid suppressors as standalone products — not our lane, and we'd be doing it for the affiliate link rather than because we have something to say. We don't publish "top 10 alternatives" pages engineered around commissions. And we don't recommend hardware, which is where the real money in audio content lives, because this site is about software and settings.

What "free" actually costs

One honest counterweight, since this post is otherwise a victory lap. Free software here does cost you something, just not money:

• Setup time. Four minutes for EasyEffects, more if you take the config-file route. A paid application on another OS installs and works.
• Nobody owes you support. A dormant project's seventy open issues are not a queue anyone is obligated to work through.
• A real capability gap. Heavier commercial models still handle chaotic, non-stationary noise better than a small 2017 model does, and meeting transcription isn't something this stack does at all. We say so on the pages where it matters.

For the common case — a fan, a road, an air conditioner, a keyboard, a person trying to be understood on a call — that gap is irrelevant and the free stack wins outright. For the uncommon cases we'd rather tell you where the ceiling is than pretend there isn't one.

How to audit us

Three things you can check without taking our word for anything. Every fragile claim on this site carries a date and a source, so you can re-run the check yourself — and if you find one that's gone stale, it's stale, and we'd want to know. The scoring script that produces our rankings ships in the site's own repository, weights and all, so the judgement calls are inspectable rather than implied. And every commercial link is marked where it appears, with the disclosure next to the button rather than in a page you'd have to go looking for.

That's the whole accounting. This is a low-revenue corner of an otherwise lucrative niche, staffed by people who think the Linux desktop's audio story deserves a site that isn't trying to sell you anything — because, mostly, there is nothing here to sell.