Six commercial links, on three pages, all labelled

Where the links are

Six outbound commercial links exist on this site, spread across three pages. Every one of them is introduced by a note placed above it — never beneath it, never only down here — saying that what follows is commercial and how many links are in it. Every other page on this site carries none at all.

• The cost working carries three: DentalPlans.com, Careington and Opencare.
• Braces without insurance carries two: DentalPlans.com and Careington.
• Cleaning around brackets carries one, to Amazon.

If you follow one and buy something the company may pay this site a fee. What you pay does not change, nothing identifying you is passed along, and no company has seen, approved, commissioned or paid for a sentence on any page here. A payout has never decided a placement, mostly because there is nothing on this site to place: it ranks nobody.

A discount plan is not insurance

Two of the four companies above sell dental discount plans, and this sentence sits beside every link to them as well as here. A discount plan is a membership that buys you access to a reduced fee list from dentists who have agreed to it. There is no insurer, no claim, no deductible and no annual maximum, because nobody is paying any part of your bill. You pay the whole reduced fee yourself.

Two things decide whether that is worth a membership fee, and both can be checked before you pay: whether a practice you can actually reach accepts the plan, and what that plan's own fee list says for the orthodontic codes you would be billed under. This site has not checked either on your behalf and cannot.

The state of these programmes, stated plainly

DentalPlans.com runs an open affiliate programme. Careington's is application-only; we have applied and have not been approved, so that link currently earns nothing, and saying so seems better than implying a partnership that does not exist. Opencare pays when a booking is made and attended, in US metro areas only. Amazon pays a small percentage on qualifying purchases.

No rate is printed anywhere on this site for any of them. The figures that circulate for these programmes come from third-party directories and disagree with each other, and this desk does not print numbers it cannot open at source — a rule it would be absurd to apply to fee schedules and abandon for its own income.

Three referrals turned down

Every at-home and mail-order aligner seller

Two of the surviving sellers in that market run open programmes and would pay this site. None of them is linked here, and none is named as somewhere to buy. This is a site about how orthodontic treatment is billed; sending a reader from a billing explainer straight into a purchase that begins without an in-person examination and records is not something anything on these pages supports. The professional guidance quoted in the chapter on why home remedies for gaps are a bad idea is the reasoning in full.

Anything sold as DIY braces, gap bands or elastics for closing a gap

Not linked, not named as a product and not reviewed, at any price. The chapter above explains the category and what the professional bodies say about it, which is the only form in which it appears here.

DentalSave

An open application that the fleet plan cleared, and the affiliate page for it sets out no rate, no cookie window and no payment terms at all. A figure lifted off a directory is not a term the company has published. We are not routing readers to a plan whose own terms we could not read.

What is not for sale here

No practice, chain, group or dental service organisation is named, ranked or linked on this site, and no arrangement would change that. No treatment abroad is arranged or recommended. There are no before-and-after images, no patient stories, no testimonials and no ratings. No commercial link sits inside a numbered list of steps, and on every page that carries links, the advice that pays us nothing is printed above them rather than below.

Everything on this page is checkable against the pages themselves: count the links, look at what is written above them. Backing out of any of these positions would mean editing this page first, where anyone who read it can see the change.