How Cap & Span is paid, and the four things we turned down

Cap & Span carries paid links. If you buy a discount-plan membership after following one of them, the provider pays us a commission. That is the whole of our income, it is disclosed above the first such link on every page that has one, and it never decides what a page says.

The three links, and what they actually sell

All three are dental discount plans: DentalPlans.com, which is a marketplace listing memberships from several networks, and the networks Careington and DentalSave. A membership buys you a reduced fee at a dentist who has agreed to that plan's fee list, in the United States only.

A discount plan is not insurance. Nobody underwrites it. No claim is filed, no annual maximum applies, nothing is reimbursed to you, and there is no benefit to appeal if you are unhappy. You pay a yearly fee, and then you pay the reduced price yourself at the desk. Those sentences appear beside every one of these links on the site, because a reader who has just been quoted four figures for a bridge is exactly the reader that the word "coverage" would mislead.

We print no commission rate for any of them. The figures circulating for these programmes come from aggregator directories rather than from inside a network, and an unconfirmed rate is not a fact. Two of the three are application-stage rather than live for this site as it launches; when any of them is approved and the placeholder link becomes a real tracking link, nothing on the page will change except the destination.

Refusal one: no dental practice, ever

No dental practice, chain, group practice or clinic is named, ranked, recommended or linked anywhere on this site, and none will be. Not for a fee, not for a "partnership", not as a list, not in a comparison. If a page here ever appears to point you at a specific place to have a crown fitted, it is a mistake and we want to hear about it.

Refusal two: no booking fee

Appointment-booking programmes exist in this niche and pay well — a flat fee once a reader turns up in a chair. We are not taking one. The job of this site is to help somebody read a treatment plan before they agree to it, and being paid by the appointment sits badly against that job. It is a judgement call rather than a rule handed to us, and it is written here so that reversing it would require rewriting this paragraph in public.

Refusal three: nothing you fit at home

No mail-order crown, bridge, veneer or tooth-repair kit, and no dental cement sold for putting a crown back yourself. There is a large search demand for exactly that and we are refusing all of it. A crown is cemented onto a tooth that has been cut down, and a bridge loads the two teeth either side of a gap; what goes back wrongly does not simply come off again. Our page on a crown that has come off says what the schedules charge to re-cement one instead, and the numbers are small.

Refusal four: no lender

No medical credit card, no dental financing product and no pay-later scheme is linked here. We verified terms for none of them, and debt taken on at a dental desk under pressure deserves better than a link from a site that has not read the agreement.

What we say that pays nothing

Asking whether a filling would do instead of a crown earns us nothing. Asking for an itemised written treatment plan with the code and fee on every line earns us nothing. Dental school clinics and community health centres earn us nothing. Those appear on this site anyway, marked as paying nothing, because they are the most useful things we know.

Every partner link on the site is marked as sponsored for search engines, routed through a /go/ address, and blocked from crawling in our robots file. If you would rather not use them, type the provider's name into a search engine instead — it costs you nothing and costs us the commission, and the advice on the page is identical either way.