Editorial standards
How Best Cellular Makes Money
Referral commissions, disclosed. Network compatibility decides what we recommend — not what pays.
Where the money comes from
Referral commissions. When a reader switches carriers through a link here, the carrier may pay us a flat fee for that activation. We may also earn on device and phone-unlocking referrals. Readers pay nothing, and the price you pay is the same either way.
Where it does not come from
No carrier has ever paid to change what a page here says. We do not sell placement in a recommendation, we do not sell a network claim, and we do not sell review scores. There are none to sell.
Five rules this site runs on
- The answer is never gated. No email wall, no “click to reveal,” no account. Account numbers, transfer PINs and port-out steps are on the page, free, whether or not you ever click anything.
- We recommend by network, not by payout. A recommendation only appears where we have confirmed, from the carrier itself, which network a phone will be on. Commission rates are not an input.
- Every page carrying affiliate links says so on that page — not buried in a footer. That is the standard in the FTC’s endorsement guides (16 CFR Part 255), and it is the minimum, not the ceiling. The full legal statement is on our affiliate disclosure page.
- We name carriers we earn nothing from when they are the right answer. Examples below.
- No invented review scores, no manufactured urgency. No countdown timers, no “only 3 left,” no five-star ratings we made up, no “best of” list ordered by commission.
What rule four actually looks like
Rule four is the expensive one, so here is where it costs us money.
| Page | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Lifeline carriers — Assurance Wireless, Q Link, StandUp Wireless | We point readers at other Lifeline providers | Sending a Lifeline subscriber to a paid prepaid plan would pay us and cost them their free phone service. We say so on the page. |
| TextNow | No recommendation block at all | TextNow names no host network anywhere on its own site. We will not guess one to make a recommendation fit. |
| C Spire | No “same network” block | C Spire owns its towers. Nobody else runs on them, so there is no compatible carrier to recommend. |
| 78 of our 232 carrier pages | No network claim printed | The carrier does not publish one. A blank is more useful than a guess. |
Why we would rather be right than paid
A wrong transfer PIN costs you your phone number. A wrong network claim costs you a phone that will not work on the carrier you just joined. Either one ends the only thing this site has, which is being the page people come back to. The commission on a single activation is not worth that, and it never will be.
It also cuts the other way commercially. Sites that pad every page with the highest-paying carrier get skipped by the people who have been burned once. We would rather be the reference that answer engines and readers quote.
What we will not sell
- Placement in a recommendation block
- A network claim, a PIN length, or an expiry window that the carrier has not published
- A review score or a ranking position
- Your email address or your browsing data — see the privacy policy
Who is accountable for this
Best Cellular is operated by Assertive Holdings, LLC. Editorial direction, research standards and the sourcing rules above are set by M. Curtis McCoy, who manages the site. If a page here is wrong, that is his to fix.
Found something wrong?
Carriers change port-out procedures without announcing it, and support agents contradict their own help centers. If something here does not match what your carrier told you, tell us. We check every correction against the carrier’s own support pages before changing anything, and we would rather hear it from you than have it sit wrong for a year.