How brands pay us

Brands pay a flat listing fee for the year. It is never a percentage of your sales and never a cut of what a student spends, so nothing we earn moves with what you buy. The first 25 brands to join list free for their first 3 months, then move onto the standard rate. Applying commits a brand to nothing, with no card and no contract, and once a brand is on board its plan and every invoice we have sent it sit together in its own partner portal.

Students pay us nothing, ever. There is no paid tier, no subscription and no fee at any point in verifying or revealing a code.

No affiliate links, no commissions

When you press through to a brand, the link goes to the brand's own address directly. There is no click-tracking hop in the middle, no affiliate network, and no commission paid to us on anything you go on to buy. If a brand's own link happens to carry tracking parameters, they are the brand's, they were in the link the brand gave us, and the brand's privacy policy covers them.

What we do count is redemption: when a code is revealed or a pass is scanned in store, that is recorded against the offer so the brand can see what their discount earned. That count is the product a brand is paying for, and it never depends on the value of your basket.

How deals are ordered

We would rather explain this than let you assume it. Offers on the deals feed and on a brand's page are ordered by three rules, in this order:

The list of every brand on the deals page is plain alphabetical order, and the category filters do not reorder anything, they only narrow the list.

Being featured is a slot we control, and our higher listing plan includes featured placement windows and category priority. That means a featured position can be part of a commercial arrangement rather than a judgement about which deal is best for you. We are telling you that here rather than calling it a recommendation.

What paying does not buy: it cannot change the terms of an offer once it is published, it cannot remove or bury another brand's offer, and it cannot put an offer under a category it does not belong to. A category filter shows every live offer in that category and nothing else.

No ad networks on this site

Tell us if we get this wrong

If something on The Uni Deals reads like an independent recommendation when it is a paid placement, that is our mistake and we want to hear about it. Email hello@theunideals.com. The same address takes a report about a brand that did not honor an offer, which is feedback we use when deciding who stays on the platform.