How we rank, and how we make money

The whole point of this site is to be the source that isn’t selling you the answer. So here’s the method, the sources, and the money — in plain sight.

The one rule

Nobody pays to move up the list. Ever. If a provider pays us a referral fee, we disclose it — and it changes nothing about the ranking or the recommendation.

Paid placement is what every “Top 10 providers” page you’ve already seen is quietly doing. It’s the reason they’re useless. We’d rather have a smaller, trusted audience than a rigged list.

How we rank

Providers are scored on a fixed, published rubric — the things that actually protect a buyer — not on who pays or who has the best logo:

• Model transparency — do you get a named, dedicated rep, or a pooled team? Do they tell you plainly?
• Pricing transparency — is there a real, published price, or a “contact sales” wall?
• Verified reviews — independent scores (G2, Clutch) from the actual profile, good and bad. We show the ugly ones too.
• Contract terms — month-to-month vs multi-month lock-ins; setup fees; commission on top.
• Red flags — pay-per-meeting incentives, subcontracting, “we do all industries,” undefined “qualified meeting.”

Where we can’t verify something, we mark it unverified or pending rather than guess. A provider we like can still score badly on transparency — and we’ll say so.

Our data & sources

Every provider fact on this site was checked against the provider’s own pages on 2026-07-12, not paraphrased from a listicle. Specifically:

• Model & pricing — read from each provider’s own site. A price that only appears in a third-party blog is labelled “3rd-party” and never treated as fact.
• Reviews — pulled from live Clutch profiles. G2 blocks automated checks, so any G2 figure is marked with an asterisk and is being re-verified by hand before public launch.
• Market & benchmark data — Bridge Group’s 2025 SDR report (in-house cost); RepVue (salary); Leadium’s published 2026 rates (per-meeting); TechCrunch and company filings (AI-SDR funding + the 11x story). Benchmark ranges from operator sources are treated as ranges, and dated ones are flagged.

How we make money (the referral disclosure)

Plainly: when you use “Get matched” and choose a provider we introduced you to, that provider may pay us a referral fee. That’s it. Two things follow from that, and we hold to both:

• It never affects the ranking or the recommendation. We recommend the best fit for your situation — including “don’t buy one yet” — whether or not that provider pays us.
• We’ll always tell you where a referral relationship exists. No hidden affiliate links dressed up as editorial.

We may also earn from clearly-labelled display ads and from affiliate links to sales tools we’d recommend anyway. None of it buys a better score.

Who’s behind this

FractionalSDR.com is an independent guide — published without any provider’s involvement, funding, or editorial input. We’re not owned by, or affiliated with, any company listed on this site.

Every “Get matched” request is read and answered by a real person, not an automated system. We’ll add named editor profiles here as the guide grows.