Who gets paid when you make a will online: referral commissions, partners and review sites

When you buy a will online, you see one price. Around it there can be several other payments: from the service to the site that sent you there, from a partner company back to the service, from a charity to the free tool you used. None of these usually changes what you pay. But they can change what you are shown, in what order, and with how much enthusiasm.

This page maps those flows, using each company’s own published pages, and says how this site is paid. It carries no affiliate links.

Flow 1: services pay review sites

Many will services run affiliate programs: a site that sends a customer earns a commission on the sale. Two companies publish their terms openly:

Service	Commission, from its own affiliate page	What it is paid on
Trust & Will	20%, with an average of $80 and a maximum of $180 per sale	Will, trust and young adult plans
LawDepot	30%	Purchases, paid once a $50 threshold is reached

Other services’ programs are described by third-party listings that we have not been able to verify against an official page, so we do not quote them. FreeWill has no affiliate program.

What this means for you: a review site has a financial reason to write about services that pay it, and to write more about the ones that pay most. That does not make every review dishonest. It does mean the free option, which pays nobody, is easy to leave out.

Flow 2: partners pay the services

Some services refer you on to partners for the jobs that come after the documents, and earn from the referral. Trust & Will is open about this: its help centre says it earns a referral commission on its deed transfer partner, which charges $140 per deed, plus recording fees.

That is disclosed, and the partner may be convenient. It is still worth a comparison: a local title company or real estate attorney may charge less for a simple deed into your own trust. Our page on unfunded trusts explains why the deed matters.

Third-party notary services work similarly at the edges. FreeWill’s remote notarisation is Through Proof, paid to Proof; bring your own witnesses or pay Proof for them, so the fee goes to the notary company, not FreeWill.

Flow 3: someone else pays for the “free” product

• Nonprofits pay FreeWill. It says More than 1,000 nonprofit partners sponsor the service, hoping users will leave them a gift.
• Premiums pay for Ethos’s will. It is Complimentary with certain Ethos life policies (Perks rider).
• Forgotten trials pay for some “free” templates, through memberships that convert.

Our page on why online wills are free goes through the three models.

How WillsVerdict is paid

We should apply the same standard to ourselves.

• Our business model is affiliate commissions from some of the paid services we review, as our disclosure says. As of this page’s date, every link from this site to a will service is a plain link to the service’s own website; we have not yet been approved by any affiliate program, and when we are, the disclosure and the links will say so.
• The order services appear in is fixed by how established each service is, not by what it pays, and it does not change if a commission does. Our methodology explains it.
• We say when the free option is enough, including on pages where that means no sale.
• Pages like this one carry no affiliate links at all. They are marked as trust pages, and our build checks fail if one ever contains an outbound commercial link.
• We publish what we do not know. Where a service does not publish a fact, the page says “not published” rather than guessing.

You should still weigh it. We are more likely to write long reviews of services we may be able to link to commercially. That limits what we cover, not what we conclude, and every figure links to the page it came from so you can check it.

How to judge any review site, including this one

1. Is there a disclosure near the top, before the first “buy” button?
2. Does it explain how the order is decided? “Our top pick” with no method is a warning sign.
3. Does it include the free option and say when free is enough?
4. Does every price link to the service’s own page, with a date?
5. Does it say who should not buy each service?
6. Does it ever recommend a lawyer instead of a product?

A site that does these things can still be wrong. A site that does none of them is not trying to be right.