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TopInsight .co

Disclosures

Affiliate links, employment conflicts, byline policy, and what we won't cover.

Affiliate relationships

TopInsight participates in affiliate programs for some of the products we cover. When you click an affiliate link and complete a qualifying purchase, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Affiliate links are tagged with rel="sponsored noopener nofollow" in the HTML.

We currently participate in (or are in the application process for):

  • Cursor — via PartnerStack
  • Notion — partner program
  • Linear — partner program
  • Cloudflare — via Impact
  • 1Password — partner program
  • Vercel — ambassador program

This list is updated as relationships start, change, or end. We do not accept sponsored articles, paid placements, or "editorial collaboration" with vendors. We do not allow vendors to review drafts before publication.

Byline policy

Articles on TopInsight are published under the byline Charles Lin. Charles is a pen name for a working engineer based in Taiwan. The pseudonym exists for one reason — reputation insulation while our AI-augmented editorial pipeline matures.

It is not used to circumvent any contractual or legal obligation. The author's real identity is known to relevant payment processors, affiliate networks, and tax authorities; only the published byline is pseudonymous.

Employment conflict-of-interest policy

The author is currently employed at Synology Taiwan. To preserve editorial independence:

  • We will not review Synology products — any model, line, software, or feature. Self-promotion is bad signal regardless of who is reading.
  • We will not publish head-to-head comparisons naming Synology against any direct competitor.
  • We do cover OSS / self-hosted storage (ZFS, TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox, Ceph, MinIO), homelab networking, drive / UPS / HBA selection, backup strategy, and benchmarking methodology.
  • We only ever cite public information about storage products — vendor spec pages, release notes, public benchmarks, public YouTube reviews. We do not publish internal roadmaps, unreleased specs, internal benchmarks, customer information, or unreleased bug details.

What about ads?

TopInsight is currently ad-free. We plan to apply for Google AdSense after the site has 25+ articles and a 3-month publishing history. If display ads ever launch, they will be clearly demarcated and never inline with article body text.

Newsletter and analytics

We use Plausible Analytics (privacy-friendly, no cookies, no personal data). We do not share visitor data with vendors. If we launch a newsletter, it will run on Buttondown with a single-click unsubscribe and no third-party tracking pixels.

Questions

Anything missing here that you'd like disclosed? Email editor@topinsight.co. We'll add it.