How we make money

We're transparent about our revenue sources because it matters for trust. RunLocalAI makes money in two ways:

1. Affiliate links

When you click a hardware link on this site and buy, we may earn a commission. Specifically:

  • Amazon Associates — for GPU, laptop, and accessory recommendations to US, EU, and other supported regions
  • Other first-class retailers — Newegg, B&H, Best Buy, and direct vendor stores (Apple, Framework, Minisforum, ASUS, Lenovo, Dell) when the editorial row supplies a curated product URL

Affiliate commissions never increase your price.

2. Display advertising

We use Google AdSense for display advertising. The integration is gated behind cookie consent and, at present, no ads are actively served on the site — it is configured and documented here for transparency in case it is enabled later (the same status described in our privacy policy). When ads do run, they are clearly labeled and never appear on benchmark tables, code blocks, or comparison data — only in supplemental positions where they don't interfere with reading.

What does NOT influence content

  • We have never accepted payment in exchange for a positive review
  • We have never been paid to feature, hide, or downrank a model, tool, or hardware product
  • Affiliate commission rates do not influence which products we recommend
  • Advertisers do not see our content before publication

Local AI tools we recommend

Most software covered on this site (Ollama, llama.cpp, KoboldCPP, oobabooga) is free and open-source. We don't have meaningful commercial relationships with these projects — when we recommend them, it's based on hands-on testing.

A handful of tools have commercial tiers or paid offerings (LM Studio's commercial license, cloud GPU rentals like RunPod, Vast.ai, Lambda Labs). When we link to these, we may use an affiliate link, and we disclose that in the affiliate-link list above.

Reader-supported alternative

If you'd rather support the site without affiliate clicks or ad views, the most useful thing you can do is contribute a benchmark — see our contact page to send us numbers from your own setup.

The disclosure pattern

Every page that contains an affiliate link displays a visible disclosure at or near the top of the affiliate block. The disclosure reads, roughly: "RunLocalAI may earn a commission if you buy through our links — this does not increase your price." We never hide affiliate links inside body prose without a parent disclosure block. We never use cloaked / shortened URLs to mask the destination retailer; if a link goes to amazon.com, the URL says amazon.com.

The Amazon Associates tag we use is fredoline-20. You can verify this by hovering any Amazon link on the site — the tag appears in the URL. If you see a different tag, it's a bug; please email us so we can fix it.

How we choose what to recommend

Recommendations on this site are made before any affiliate-link consideration. The editorial flow is:

  1. We identify the buyer decision a page is supposed to answer (e.g. "best GPU for Qwen at the 32B-class tier").
  2. We pick the cards that genuinely answer that question — based on VRAM ceiling, memory bandwidth, ecosystem support, and operational envelope.
  3. We rank those picks by buyer leverage, not by affiliate program availability. A card with no affiliate program can still be the recommended pick — we just link to it without a commission and say so.
  4. We attach affiliate links to the picks where they exist. If our top pick has no Amazon listing (e.g. a used 3090 from a regional reseller), we recommend it anyway and note where to find it.

The financial reality: affiliate revenue per click on a $700 used card is comparable to revenue per click on a $2,000 new card. We don't have a structural reason to push readers up-tier. The editorial reason is the buyer's actual budget — that's the lens we keep.

What we don't do

  • No paid placements. We have never accepted payment in exchange for inclusion in a buyer guide, comparison, or "top picks" list.
  • No fake urgency. No countdown timers, no "limited time" framing, no manufactured scarcity. Hardware prices change; we note that with a freshness label.
  • No fake reviews / fake aggregate ratings. Pros/Cons rich-result data on this site is drawn from the editorial whoIsItFor / whoShouldSkip arrays. There is no "9.2/10 from 142 reviews" line because we don't have 142 reviews.
  • No popups, floating CTAs, or interstitials. Affiliate CTAs appear in fixed positions inside the page flow.
  • No tracking pixels for advertisers beyond the consent-gated AdSense scripts disclosed in the privacy policy. We do not run Google Analytics; on-site analytics are Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights only, and they load only after consent.

Last reviewed: this page is reviewed quarterly to ensure disclosures stay accurate.