Interest Disclosure — Who Pays, And What That Does Not Buy

Interest disclosure

Material Primer is editorially independent and commercially funded. Those two facts sit together on purpose. We are not a charity and we do not pretend to be one. Someone pays for this reference to exist, and you are entitled to know who, on what terms, and what it does not buy them.

A supplier can pay to be listed. No one can pay to be recommended, and no one can pay to have a limitation removed.

Where the money comes from

  1. 1. Referral fees — our main intended income. When a buyer tells us what they need and we introduce them to a supplier, we may be paid a fee by that supplier, per introduction or on a concluded order. The buyer pays us nothing.
  2. 2. Paid listing. A supplier may pay to have its record carried in this database.
  3. 3. Paid reference material. Compliance comparison sheets, sourcing checklists and material dossiers, sold as downloads.

We will add nothing to this list without saying so on this page first, with the date.

What payment buys

  • Presence: a record in the database, and the chance to be introduced to a buyer who is looking for what that supplier actually sells.
  • Nothing else.

What payment does not buy

  • A recommendation. We do not rank suppliers against each other and we do not sell placement in any list.
  • A better description. The limitations section of a material entry is written the same way whether the supplier pays us or has never heard of us.
  • Removal or softening of a warning. No one gets to edit, shorten, or condition what we publish about where a material fails, what a certificate does not cover, or what has no test record behind it.
  • A quantified result. We publish no figure we cannot point to a source for — including for a supplier who pays.
  • Silence about a bad answer. If a supplier will not answer a question we think a buyer must ask, that refusal is part of the record.

The database has no field for who paid

This is checkable rather than promised. The content model behind this site has six published record types — material categories, material products, certificates, regulations, glossary terms and case studies — and not one of them has a field for commercial relationship, sponsorship, payment status or placement rank. There is nowhere for such a value to be stored, so there is nothing for it to sort by, filter on, or push to the top of a page. Supplier records are held separately, are internal, and are not published.

What we are not

We have said this elsewhere on the site and we repeat it here, because a funding page is exactly where a reader should be told the unflattering version:

  • We have no laboratory. We have never run a bench test, we hold no ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, and no number on this site originates with us.
  • We receive no production or transaction data from factories. Nothing here is derived from a supplier’s batch records.
  • We are not independent of all suppliers. We intend to earn money from introductions to some of them. “Editorially independent” is a rule about what payment cannot move. It is not a claim that no money is involved.

Everything we publish is either a reading of a public document — a standard, a certificate scope, a regulation, a supplier’s own published specification — or a statement that no record exists.

Why we bind our own hands

Partly because the whole value of a reference is that a reader believes it was not written by a seller, and that belief cannot be repaired once broken. Partly because of the law: under EU Directive 2005/29/EC as amended by Directive (EU) 2024/825, which member states apply from 27 September 2026, hiding a commercial relationship inside what looks like an editorial recommendation is a prohibited practice in our main market.

How to check us on it

  • Ask us directly whether a supplier you are reading about pays us. We will answer, naming the arrangement. If you would rather ask in writing, use the contact page.
  • Compare an entry for a supplier you know pays no one with one you suspect does. The limitations sections should read the same way. If they do not, tell us and quote both.
  • Every claim on this site is meant to carry a source you can open. Where a claim has no source, it should say so in the entry itself. A missing source is a reportable defect, not a style choice — send it to us and we will correct or delete the line.

Last reviewed: 23 August 2026.