1 Hour Startup Affiliate disclosure

Some of these links pay us. The ranking cannot see which.

1 Hour Startup · last updated 10 September 2026

The short version. 1 Hour Startup has no ads and no in-app purchases. At the end of a run the game recommends real build tools, and some of those links can pay us a commission if you sign up. The game labels which ones on the card itself, next to the link, before you tap. The order those tools appear in is computed from how well each one fits what you just built, and the code that computes it never reads the commission data at all.

What the relationship actually is

Every tool the game recommends is a real, independently operated product that we do not own and are not paid to place. Nobody buys a slot. What varies between them is only what the vendor's own program pays us if you sign up after arriving from here, and there are three kinds of answer to that:

A paid affiliate program — the vendor pays us real money for a signup.
A referral program that pays credits — the vendor pays in usage credit on their own service, not cash.
No program at all — the tool is in the list purely because it fits, and a click earns us nothing.

We deliberately do not publish a count of how many links are in each group. A single signed agreement moves a tool from one group to another overnight, and a page that quotes a number nobody re-reads becomes a false statement the day it changes. What is written here is true whatever the list holds: some links may pay us, the game says which, and the ranking cannot see either way.

How the ranking works, and how you can check

Recommendations are ordered by fit, and by nothing else. The function that scores a tool reads only fit information — the category, the subcategory, what you said the product does and who it is for. It does not read the commission field, and it does not read the editorial ordering field either; the word for that field does not appear anywhere in the executable code of the file that does the scoring.

That claim is not left as a promise. A test in the codebase proves it by attack:

It builds a pair of tools where a cash-paying, top-of-the-editorial-order, badly fitting tool is placed against an unpaid, bottom-of-the-order, well fitting one — and asserts the unpaid one wins.
It then takes the real shipped list and rewrites it: every tool's commission type rotated to a different one, every editorial ordering value reversed. It runs both versions through many different run contexts and asserts the output order comes back identical every time.

If commission ever started influencing the ranking, that test would fail before the build shipped. It runs in the same suite as the rest of the game's checks.

What the game tells you, and when

Disclosure sits with the recommendation, not on a page you have to go looking for — which is what the FTC's endorsement guidance (16 CFR Part 255) asks for. These are the sentences the shipped build draws, word for word:

On every recommendation cardRanked by how well each one fits what you just built — never by what pays us.

On a card that holds at least one paying linkSome of these links pay us. The ranking is computed without knowing which.

And each individual row carries its own badge and its own sentence, immediately beside that tool's link:

Row badge: AffiliateAffiliate — this vendor runs a paid affiliate program.

Row badge: ReferralReferral — this vendor's program pays usage credits, not cash.

Row badge: No programNo program — listed only because it fits.

Which of these a row gets is derived from the link itself rather than from a flag somebody has to remember to set: if the destination URL carries a tracking parameter, the row discloses. The test is deliberately blunt and errs towards over-disclosing — a link that carries any query string gets a label it may not strictly need. That costs a line of small print. The opposite mistake costs a false statement, so we would rather be wrong in the cheap direction. A link swapped in years from now starts disclosing the moment its URL does, with nobody having to remember anything.

What we do not do

We do not sell placement. No vendor has paid to be in the list or to be higher in it, and there is no mechanism by which they could.
We do not attach anything about you to an outbound link. The URLs are fixed strings. No run identifier, no profile identifier, no install identifier is appended. A vendor learns that a click came from us — not which player it was.
We do not track you after you leave. Tapping a tool opens your own browser and leaves the app. From that point the vendor's own privacy policy applies, not ours.
We do not hide a tool because it pays nothing. The list deliberately includes tools with no program at all, and one of them outranking a paying tool is the normal case, not an exception.

What we record about a link

The app records that a build-tool link was shown to you and that you tapped one, with the name of the tool, so we can tell whether these recommendations are useful at all. Those records carry no score, no idea, no choice you made and no text you typed. The privacy policy lists every event the app sends, in full.

Questions, or a correction

If anything on this page does not match what you see in the app, that is a bug and we want to know: support@1hourstartup.online. For partnership and affiliate-program enquiries, the same address reaches us.