How we make money

Subscriptions are the primary revenue. Driftly Pro is what pays for the data verification, the visa research and the engineering. If the product is useful, people pay for it — that is the whole business model.

Affiliate commissions are secondary. When you buy an eSIM, an insurance policy or a ticket through a link here, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every such link carries a visible disclosure directly beneath it.

Transport links follow a stricter rule. An eSIM is destination-agnostic — which one you need depends on where you already decided to go. Transport is not: it would pay us for you to move more often, and moving less is usually cheaper, calmer and better for your work and your tax position. So transport links appear only where a move is already decided or already forced by a visa deadline: the border-run planner, a trip you have just saved, and the Nomad kit reference list. Never on Explore, never as a route suggestion, and never in a notification. No fare alerts, ever.

Banking links are information, not advice. We list multi-currency accounts only — the ones you use instead of local banking. We will never link you to opening a local bank account, and never to the agencies charging $200–500 for "account opening assistance", a space with real scams targeting exactly this audience. Where local banking matters for a city, we write it in the city note with no link attached. These links carry a standing disclaimer, live in their own section of the Nomad kit page, and are deliberately kept away from anything about tax residency.

Company formation is the one we most want you to distrust. It pays more than everything else here put together — up to $1,500 a referral — so we built it as a questionnaire that is capable of telling you not to do it, rather than as a card. If you are tax resident in the UK, Germany, Australia or 50-odd other countries, controlled- foreign-company rules let the tax authority look through a US LLC and tax the profits as yours whether or not you took a distribution, so it changes nothing about your bill. On that outcome we show no link at all, and it is the most common outcome. A foreign-owned single-member LLC also has to file Form 5472 every year even at zero US tax, and the penalty is $25,000 per form, per year — a fact almost nobody selling formations leads with. We would rather say that than earn the commission.

One link per screen, at most. No screen in Driftly shows more than a single partner card. If a screen wants two, they go on the Nomad kit page instead. The risk from here is not too little revenue — it is this app quietly turning into a link farm.

Commissions never affect city rankings or cost data. Explore ordering, the Compare table, the arbitrage calculator, the border-run ranking and every city score are computed only from your income, your filters and our seed data. Those modules are structurally partner-free: no affiliate link may be rendered in them, and every affiliate URL in the app lives in one config file so this is verifiable rather than promised.

The editorial notes are ours. Partners do not review, approve or write them, which is why some of them are unflattering.

No ads. No banners, no interstitials, no third-party ad network, ever.