Free is a price, not a business model. Every free shopping tool pays its bills somehow, and you are entitled to know how before you install anything that watches you shop.
The answers you will find
Some free tools earn honest affiliate commissions when you buy through them, which aligns reasonably well with helping you. Some sell advertising. And some of the most popular ones had an answer their users did not like: they watched browsing across the web and sold what they learned. The tool was free because the user was the product. When that practice surfaced publicly, the trust never fully came back, and it reshaped how careful people evaluate this entire category.
Questions that sort them quickly
What permissions does it ask for at install, and do they match its job? A tool that checks prices on one site has no business reading your history everywhere. Does the company say plainly how it makes money, or does the answer take a paragraph of hedging? Is there a privacy promise specific enough to be broken, or just a policy written to be unfalsifiable?
Our answer, in writing
We are True Finds, and here is ours, as a product promise rather than fine print. Sinclair, our free AI price protector, reads only the product page you are on. No browsing history, no tracking across sites, and the narrowest permissions Chrome allows for the job. Any future feature that learns your preferences requires your explicit approval first. We make money when members choose to pay for premium tools, never by selling data. That keeps us on your side of the table, permanently, and it is the standard we think you should hold every free tool to, including ours.