Three paid links, two refusals, and the reasoning for both

What earns money here

Three links, and all three sit on one page — the cost page. Every other page on this site, including the chapter on keeping a tooth or pulling it, carries none. The three are introduced by a note saying they are commercial, placed above them rather than beneath them or in the footer.

• DentalPlans.com — a marketplace for dental discount plans. Their programme is open and pays a fee per plan purchase.
• Careington — discount plans sold directly. Their programme is application-only, and we have applied and not been approved. The link works either way and earns us nothing in the meantime; we would rather say so than imply a partnership that does not exist.
• Opencare — appointment booking in US metro areas. Pays when a booking is completed and attended.

If you follow one and buy something, the company may pay us. Your price is the same either way, we are not told who you are, and nothing on either page was written, reviewed, approved or paid for by any of them.

A discount plan is not insurance

Every page that carries one of those links says this next to it, and it is worth saying once more on its own. A dental 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 a share of your bill. You pay the whole reduced fee yourself.

Whether that is worth a membership fee depends on two things we cannot answer for you: whether a dentist you can reach accepts the plan, and what that plan's own fee list says for the specific codes you need. Both are checkable in advance. Do the checking before the payment.

The two we turned down

DentalSave. An open application, and the fleet plan cleared it. Their own affiliate page publishes no terms at all — no rate, no cookie window, no payment schedule. We are not sending somebody with a painful tooth to a plan whose terms we could not read ourselves, and a rate found on a third-party directory is not the same as a rate the company has published.

Dentulu, and teledentistry generally, on the emergency chapter. The brief this site was built to allows a teledentistry link on the chapter about tooth pain and dental emergencies. That is precisely the page where it does not belong. The whole point of that chapter is that spreading swelling, a temperature, or trouble breathing or swallowing need somebody physically present today. A video consultation cannot drain an abscess, and putting a paid link to one beside that advice would be selling against our own page.

Both refusals are here in public. Reversing either would mean rewriting this page first, in front of everyone who has read it.

What we will not do at any price

No practice, chain, group practice or dental service organisation is named, ranked or linked anywhere on this site. No treatment abroad is arranged or recommended. No before-and-after photographs, no patient stories, no testimonials — not because they do not convert, but because there is no honest way for a site with no clinical access to verify one.

No link sits inside a numbered list of steps. And no link comes before the advice that pays us nothing: the section carrying all three opens by telling you to get the problem-focused exam and the X-ray first, because until that has happened nobody knows what you need. The links are the third item in that section, not the first.

If you would rather not

Every commercial link on this site has a free alternative stated beside it. Dental school clinics and community health centres treat teeth at institutional rates and pay us nothing. Asking a practice directly for a cash price, line by line, pays us nothing. Both of those are on the pages, in the same size type as the links.