How this site makes money

1. Every revenue line

• Address Environmental Report, $39 one-off, paid by the reader.
• Watch, $9 per month or $79 per year, paid by the reader.
• Pro, $49 per month, paid by professionals.
• Provider placement, $199 per month, paid by service providers.
• Affiliate commissions on test kits and treatment equipment, paid by vendors.

That is the complete list. There is no advertising, no sponsored content and no data brokerage.

2. Reports and subscriptions

Most of our revenue comes directly from readers, which is deliberate: a reader-paid product has no incentive to find problems that are not there. The report is generated from the same public datasets as the free pages. What you pay for is the per-address radius work, the water system join, and the plain-language reading, not access to secret data.

The free address check exists partly to stop us selling reports that will disappoint. When nothing is on the record near an address, the check says so and explicitly does not offer you a report. That costs us sales and it is the correct behaviour.

3. Provider placement

Water treatment companies, testing laboratories and remediation contractors can pay $199 per month for a disclosed listing in their service area and to receive introductions from readers whose records raised something they handle.

The structure is deliberately constrained:

• Flat monthly fee only. Never per lead, never per job won, never a percentage of the work. A per-job cut would give us a direct financial interest in you buying remediation, which is exactly the interest a records publisher must not have.
• Always labelled. A paid listing is marked as a paid placement wherever it appears.
• Never called a recommendation. We do not vouch for any provider's work, and payment is not a quality signal.
• One introduction, one provider. Your details go to the single provider matched to your request, not to a bidding pool.
• No area is monetised by default. Where no provider has paid for an area, the request is answered directly or not monetised at all. We do not invent a listing to fill a slot.

4. Affiliate links

Some product links, principally water test kits and filtration equipment, pay us a commission if you buy. The price you pay is unchanged.

Rules we apply to them:

• Links are disclosed at the point of use, not only on this page.
• Products are chosen against certification. For PFAS that means NSF/ANSI 53 or 58 with an explicit PFOA and PFOS reduction claim, not marketing language.
• Our guide on filtration names the technologies that do not work, including categories we could otherwise have sold, because that is the more useful half of the answer.
• No page's data, ranking or reading depends on whether a link earns anything.

5. What money cannot buy

This is the operative section, and it is short on purpose.

• Removal or alteration of a record. If a facility appears in EPA's data, it appears here. A company that dislikes its listing should take it up with the agency; we will publish the correction the moment the source carries it.
• Position in any ranking or table. Order is by measured value, always.
• The reading of a result. An exceedance is reported as an exceedance whether or not anyone nearby is a paying provider.
• Coverage of a place. Every county is covered, funded or not.
• Anything in the report. Reports contain no paid content.
• Reader contact details. Never sold, never listed, never brokered.

6. What we refuse

Named so that we can be held to it:

• Per-job or percentage-of-work arrangements with remediation contractors.
• Payment to remove, soften or delay publication of a record.
• Sponsored articles, native advertising, or any paid content presented as editorial.
• Selling reader contact details to anyone, including to providers who did not receive that reader's own request.
• Lead-generation arrangements that route one reader's enquiry to multiple bidders.
• Any use of our material to screen tenants, employees or borrowers, which our terms prohibit outright.

7. Ownership and the wider portfolio

Umwelt is owned and operated by QEIP LLC, which operates other internet properties. Two disclosures follow from that.

We link to sister sites. Radon and air quality are covered in depth by lung.com, also operated by QEIP, and county pages link there. No money changes hands for those links in either direction, and they are editorial rather than paid.

We share infrastructure. Hosting, payment processing and email are shared with other properties in the portfolio, at cost. This is an operational arrangement and has no bearing on content.

8. Editorial policy

The rules the pages are written under:

• Every figure is a dataset row. Nothing is modelled, estimated, extrapolated or written from memory. If we cannot source it, it does not appear.
• Exceedances only against live limits. The four PFAS standards EPA proposed rescinding in May 2026 are reported as detections with their measured values and no invented threshold.
• Agency vocabulary, then translation. We use EPA's exact status words and then explain what they mean, rather than paraphrasing them into something more dramatic.
• No verdicts. This site will never tell you a property is safe or unsafe.
• Gaps are stated. Our coverage is federal, most contaminated sites are state-managed, and every page that could mislead by omission says so.
• Corrections are logged in public. The corrections page lists what was wrong and what fixed it, including defects found before launch.

9. How this site is produced

The data pipelines, the pages and the written guides on this site are produced with substantial use of AI, operating on federal datasets and published standards. We think readers are entitled to know that rather than to infer it.

What it changes: coverage of this scale, refreshed quarterly, is affordable in a way it would not otherwise be, which is why the reference pages can be free.

What it does not change: every figure still traces to a named dataset with a retrieval date, the guides cite the standards they describe, and errors are logged publicly when found. Those are the checks that matter regardless of who or what wrote the page, and the corrections log is the honest measure of how well they are working.