How We Make Money, and What It Does Not Buy

Every site that reviews brokers has a business model. Most bury it. Ours is on this page, in plain terms, because a review is worth nothing to you if you cannot see what is behind it.

The short version

Plain Investor currently has no commercial relationship with any broker, fund, developer, immigration adviser or programme covered on this site. Nothing on the site is a paid placement, and no one has paid to be reviewed, scored, ranked, included or excluded. We intend to add affiliate partnerships in future; when we do, every partner link will be labelled as one, this page will name every partner, and the rules below will still apply.

What money cannot buy here

These are rules, not aspirations, and they are the reason the site is worth reading at all:

• Scores are computed, not negotiated. Every broker is scored 1–5 on the same five criteria, and the overall figure is the plain average of those five. A commercial relationship is not one of the inputs and cannot move a score by a single decimal.
• Rankings are arithmetic. The “best for” pages re-weight the same five scores for a specific use case, and publish the weighting used. No position on any list is bought, and none is placed by hand.
• Criticism is not negotiable. Every review carries a “watch out” section, and partnership does not soften it. If a partner broker has a $100 exit fee, a thin product range, or a regulatory history, it says so.
• No pay-to-be-included, and no pay-to-be-excluded. Which brokers and programmes we cover is an editorial decision about what readers are actually searching for.
• Partner links are labelled every time. Marked in the text, and marked in the HTML with rel="sponsored", which is what Google asks publishers to do.
• We are not paid by any government, developer, fund or immigration adviser in the golden visa section, and we do not broker, sell or advise on those programmes.

How the reviews are actually produced

Facts come from primary sources first — the broker’s or government’s own published schedule, the regulator’s register, the text of the legislation — and from reputable secondary reporting where a primary source does not exist. Where a figure is disputed, single-sourced or in transition, we say so in the text rather than picking the tidier number. Where a rule changed recently, we date it. We would rather publish “as of September 2026, reportedly” than a clean sentence that turns out to be wrong for a reader about to move money.

We do not publish invented star ratings, testimonials from people who do not exist, or awards nobody gave us. Every number in a score traces back to a stated criterion, and the methodology is published in full on the broker reviews page.

What this site is not

Plain Investor is a publisher, not an adviser, a broker, or an intermediary. Nothing here is personalised investment, tax, legal or immigration advice, and nothing here takes account of your circumstances, because we do not know them. Regulated advice is a service you should get from someone licensed in your own country, who is accountable to you and to a regulator. We write the background reading you do before that conversation.

Corrections

Fees, rules and regulatory positions change constantly, and we get things wrong like everyone else. Where we do, we fix the page rather than quietly delete it. If you find an error — particularly a number that could cost someone money — tell us and we will correct it.

Last reviewed September 2026. This page describes our commercial and editorial position as of that date and is updated when it changes.