How Sahvelo makes money

The guidance comes first

Sahvelo first determines what may actually help. Only then can a commercial option appear.

A paid option should appear only where the guidance has already established the need. The same placement must also say when you do not need the service and identify a free or do-it-yourself alternative when one exists. Those are required fields: a page that cannot fill them in cannot carry a link at all, because the build refuses it.

Commercial relationships are not rankings. Sahvelo does not sell position or inclusion, and the order of options is not for sale.

Sahvelo's commercial relationships

Sahvelo has no live commercial relationships. Nothing on this site currently earns it a commission, and no page carries a paid link.

That is a statement about today, generated from the site's own configuration rather than written by hand — when the first relationship goes live it appears in a table here on the same build that puts the link on the page. There is no version of this site where a commission exists and this page does not name it.

Where Sahvelo does not take money

Some categories are worth money and Sahvelo does not take it. These are not oversights, and each one is recorded with its reason so the decision can be argued with rather than assumed.

• Funeral and cremation provider comparison. Sahvelo takes nothing from funeral homes or cremation providers. The money in that category comes from families not knowing they have a right to an itemized price list by telephone, and taking a referral fee would put Sahvelo on the wrong side of the exact gap its page exists to close.
• Selling a home from an estate. Sahvelo takes nothing from estate agents or property services. A referral fee inside a sale is paid at the moment you most need Sahvelo to be neutral about whether to sell at all.
• Finding a probate or estate attorney. Sahvelo takes nothing from lawyers or lawyer-matching services. Fee-sharing with a lawyer is prohibited to a non-lawyer under the professional conduct rules, referral services are separately regulated, and a page that helps you work out whether you need a lawyer at all is worth more to you than one paid to find you one.
• Assisted living, memory care and placement services. Sahvelo takes nothing from senior-living communities or placement services. Placement services are free to families because communities pay them a share of the rent — which means the free adviser is paid by the other side of the decision. Explaining that and then taking the same fee would make Sahvelo the thing it just explained.
• Choosing a hospice provider. Sahvelo takes nothing from hospices. Payment for a referral into Medicare-funded care is a criminal matter under the federal anti-kickback statute, the people choosing are at their most vulnerable, and CMS already publishes the comparison data free.
• Funeral preplanning and prepayment. Sahvelo takes nothing from funeral pre-need sales. Its own research across three states found that prepaid money is protected less than a family would expect, and that writing the wishes down and funding them in a payable-on-death account leaves the money under the family's control — and selling into a category where that is what the statutes show would not survive contact with the finding.
• Life insurance and annuities. Sahvelo takes nothing from insurers. It holds no producer license in any state, and the compensation structures in this category are exactly the kind that bend a recommendation. What it does publish — how to find a policy that already exists, and what an insurer owes a beneficiary — stays editorial.
• Long-term care insurance. Sahvelo takes nothing from long-term care insurers, for the same reasons, and one more: its existing content on this is about making an existing policy pay and stopping one lapsing by accident. That is a consumer-protection posture and it cannot coexist with selling the product.
• Financial advisers and investment products. Sahvelo takes nothing from financial advisers or investment products. Referral compensation here creates precisely the conflict the fiduciary rules exist to police, and Sahvelo has no way to assess an adviser.
• Medicare plan selection. Sahvelo takes nothing from Medicare plans or brokers. Medicare marketing is closely supervised, lead generation in this category is a known abuse vector, and a SHIP counselor in your own state gives the same advice free.

The common thread is that in each of these the honest answer costs the reader less than the sold answer, and being paid by the other side would make that answer harder to write.

What commercial relationships cannot change

Commercial relationships do not create Sahvelo pages, change factual guidance, or buy placement.

Sahvelo does not publish paid rankings and does not describe a service more favorably because of compensation. Where the honest assessment is that most readers should not buy anything, the page says that instead.

Where Sahvelo cannot verify a company's own published claims, it does not present them as Sahvelo's findings. Prices and coverage on this site are the company's statements.

What Sahvelo records

Sahvelo records when a commercial link is shown and when it is clicked, along with the partner, the category, the page it appeared on, and the state the page was showing guidance for. No cookie is set, no identifier is generated, nothing is stored in your browser, and none of it is attached to a personal profile or sold.

Sahvelo also uses Google Analytics 4, for limited site measurement. It receives a short, fixed list of events — a page was viewed, a conversation started, the Handbook was opened or finished, a search ran and how many results it came back with, a recommendation or a commercial link was shown or followed — together with the address and title of the page, and nothing the address carried after a question mark.

Nothing you write reaches it. Not a message you send Sahvelo, not an answer Sahvelo gave you, not a search you typed, not a Handbook answer, and no name, email address, account number or free text of any kind. The state you are asking about and the situation you are in stay out of it as well.

Google Signals, ad personalization signals and client storage are turned off, so this sets no analytics cookie and creates no lasting identifier in your browser. Google’s tag does still record what any analytics tool sees: the page you arrived from, your browser and language, and an approximate location from your network address.

The service you visit may use its own cookies or tracking, under its own privacy policy rather than this one.

If a recommendation looks wrong

If a commercial link feels out of place, a page reads more like a sales pitch than guidance, or a service appears inconsistent with what Sahvelo says, we want to know. Treat that as a correction, in the same way as an incorrect source or rule.