Independence and funding

• Page updated 2026-10-22

A hardware checker is only useful if its answer does not depend on who pays. This page says how RigCheck is paid for today, what it may accept later, and the rules that hold either way.

Today

• No advertising or sponsorship on any page, and no paid placements in the checkers or tables.
• No payments or gifts from the companies whose models, runtimes, graphics cards, computers or cloud services appear on the site, and no review hardware.
• Referral links after a "no": after a "does not fit" or "with caveats" answer, most checkers show other ways to run the model below the result. The RunPod and Vast.ai links there are referral links, disclosed at the top of that block: if you pay for that service, the provider may give RigCheck platform credit or a commission. The link to compare cards by memory size goes to a RigCheck page.
• Not affiliated with any model developer, runtime project or hardware maker. Product names belong to their owners.
• Costs (the domain and hosting) are paid by the project itself.

Rules that hold whatever happens later

1. Money never changes an answerNo payment, link or partner can change a verdict, the file or setup a checker picks, the order of any list, or any number on a page.
2. Paid links only as a way outA paid link (for example to rent a cloud graphics card) may appear only after the checker says "does not fit" or "with caveats", never next to a "fits" answer, and never inside the checker's result.
3. Every paid link is disclosed where it appearsIn the same block as the link and before it, naming the paid links, not only on this page.
4. Disclosed one by oneIf RigCheck ever accepts a sponsorship, hardware, cloud credit or early access, the pages it touches say so, and this page lists it with the date.
5. Bad results are published tooA sponsor or partner gets no say over a result that is unfavourable to them.
6. No display ads in the checkersIf the site ever shows ads, they stay out of the checkers and their results.

Disclosures

• 22 October 2026: RunPod and Vast.ai referral links added to the "Other ways to run it" block of the checkers. RigCheck Lab rents its test cards at normal prices; neither referral program gives RigCheck early access or a say over any result.

How the pages are written

RigCheck is a small project that does not name its editor; it publishes as RigCheck Lab. Pages are researched and written with AI models, working from saved, dated sources. Before a new page or a change to its numbers goes live, a second AI model reviews it against those sources: one from a different developer where available, otherwise a separate session that does not see the author's reasoning, as the review archive records. Every confirmed mistake gets an automated test. The methodology page explains how each answer is calculated and labeled.

Your data

The checkers run in your browser and do not send the hardware you select to us (share links made before 7 October 2026 are the one exception); what we measure is on the privacy page. The referral links do not receive your selections either: they carry only RigCheck's referral code.

Questions or concerns

If you think an answer looks influenced, or you want to report a conflict of interest, email hello@localrigcheck.com. Corrections are handled as described on the About page.