ChalkLine
Classroom Rules
Every classroom posts its rules on the wall; here are ours. This one page is ChalkLine's affiliate disclosure, editorial policy, privacy notice and terms of use — written in the plain language we'd want from anyone else. Last updated 20 September 2026.
Rule 1 — Money is disclosed where it happens
Some links on ChalkLine are affiliate links, principally to Krisp via our /go/krisp/ route. If you start a paid plan after clicking one, we may earn a commission. It never changes your price. Every affiliate link is disclosed next to the link itself, not just here; each carries rel="sponsored" so machines know what people were told. Vendors we link without any affiliate relationship — the teaching platforms (Preply, italki, Outschool, Cambly), webinar platforms (Livestorm, Demio), and NVIDIA — are linked because the content needed them, and we say "no affiliate relationship" on the pages where it matters.
Rule 2 — Verdicts are computed, facts are dated
Scores on this site come from a scoring script that ships with the site itself (tools/fit-score.py) — its judgments, weights and reasoning are inspectable, and no table cell is typed by hand. Vendor prices, plan limits and platform features are verified against the vendor's own pages and carry the date we checked. When we can't confirm something at the primary source, we print the uncertainty instead of the folklore. We never invent tests, benchmarks, or people.
Rule 3 — What we collect (almost nothing)
ChalkLine is a static site. No accounts, no comments, no newsletter pop-up, no forms. We use a standard analytics tool to see aggregate traffic — which pages get read, roughly from where — and we don't use it to identify you. Outbound links take you to other companies' sites, where their privacy policies take over; affiliate routes like /go/krisp/ pass you to the vendor and the vendor's tracking, which is how commissions are attributed. If you email us ([email protected]), we keep the email long enough to fix the thing you told us about.
Rule 4 — What this site is, and isn't
ChalkLine is editorial opinion built on verified-as-dated facts. It is not professional advice, a guarantee that software will behave on your machine, or a contract. Vendors change prices and features without asking us; the verification dates tell you how fresh each claim is, and the vendor's own site is always the final word. You use the recommendations at your own judgment — which, if you've read our pages, is exactly the judgment we've been trying to arm.
Rule 5 — Our content stays ours; yours stays yours
The writing on ChalkLine belongs to ChalkLine. Quote reasonably with a link and we'll be delighted; republish wholesale and we won't. Product names and trademarks — Krisp, Preply, italki, Outschool, Cambly, Livestorm, Demio, NVIDIA and the rest — belong to their owners; their appearance here is reference, not endorsement in either direction, and no vendor reviews our copy before publication.
Rule 6 — Corrections beat pride
If we got a fact wrong, we fix the page, update its verification date, and — when the error was load-bearing — leave a note saying what changed. Send corrections to [email protected]. The teacher's version of this rule applies: the red pen is a kindness.
Rule 7 — Recommendations expire; dates tell you when
Software advice rots faster than grammar advice. A pricing table verified in September is a historical document by the following spring; a platform note describing a classroom's device check is only as good as the platform's last redesign. That's why every load-bearing claim on this site carries its verification date, and why we'd rather print "we could not confirm this at the primary source" than quietly repeat last year's fact. If you're reading a page whose dates have gone stale, treat the reasoning as durable and the specifics as a homework assignment — the vendor's own site is the answer key.
The short version, for the back row: we tell you when a link pays us, we date every fact, we compute every score, we collect almost nothing about you, and when we're wrong we say so. Class dismissed.