How ProviderIntel stays honest

Here's the deal.

I'm not taking money from providers. Not now. Not later. Not ever in a way that affects rankings. That's the whole point of this site — if I did, it would just be another directory pretending to be independent, and there are already too many of those.

Why this exists

A while back I went looking for legitimate peptide therapy for myself. I'm interested in longevity, I pay attention to my own labs, and I think about health optimization the way I think about everything else — as a system to understand and improve. What I found when I started looking was a mess. Gray market vendors shipping unregulated compounds from overseas. Reddit threads with conflicting advice from anonymous users. “Directories”that were obviously paid listings dressed up as recommendations. Real clinics buried three pages deep in Google because they didn't spend money on SEO.

The people running scams were easier to find than the people running legitimate practices. That bothered me.

I'm a builder by nature. I ran a marketing company for about twenty years, so I know exactly what paid placements look like from the inside — I know the playbook every “independent review site” uses to hide sponsored content, because I watched people build those sites for a living. I also spend most of my days now building with Claude Code and other AI tools.

So I started doing my own research. I built spreadsheets. Cross-referenced Google reviews against state medical board records. Crawled clinic websites to figure out who actually named their pharmacy partners and who was hiding behind vague “board-certified physicians on staff.”I was doing it for me. At some point I looked at what I'd built and thought: if I'm going through this much trouble to find a good provider, everyone else trying to do the same thing is hitting the same wall.

So I kept building — but for everyone.

Why you can believe me when I say “no money, ever”

Here's the part that matters, and the part most “independent”sites can't honestly say:

I don't need the money.

I'm financially independent from a previous business. I run this site out of my own pocket, and the cost to keep it running is trivial compared to what it would cost me — in reputation, in self-respect, in the whole point of the project — to compromise it.

That's the only version of the “no paid placements”promise that's actually credible. Anyone making that promise without a way to pay their rent is one bad month away from breaking it. I'm not. That's not a brag — it's just the precondition that makes independence possible here.

I also don't wantthe money. I've spent the last several years reorganizing my life around personal autonomy — building off-grid, self-hosting everything I can, reducing dependency on platforms and middlemen and anyone else's judgment of what I'm allowed to do. You can find me on X as @realtechfarmr — that's where I share the build in public. The short version: I'd rather own a small thing that tells the truth than run a big thing that has to lie.

This site is an extension of that. It's one more thing that doesn't depend on anyone else's platform, and that means it doesn't have to make anyone else happy to keep existing.

What I will never do

These are commitments, not marketing copy. If any of them stop being true, I'll tell you on this page first.

• Never take money from a provider to be listed. If a provider matches the research criteria, they're listed. If they don't, they aren't. Money doesn't change that calculation.
• Never take money from a provider to rank higher. Rankings come from the Trust Score methodology. Period. If I ever change a score, there's an audit trail and a reason, and it's never “they paid me.”
• Never hide a negative finding because someone asked nicely. If a provider has complaints, license issues, or real red flags, that information goes on their page. Providers can contact me to correct factual errors. They can't contact me to remove accurate bad news.
• Never disguise an ad as a recommendation. If I ever run contextual ads or affiliate links (see below), they'll be clearly labeled as ads. You'll never be confused about what's a recommendation and what's a paid placement.
• Never sell user data. I don't track individuals. Analytics are aggregated only. No cookies following you around. No retargeting. No ad networks.

How this is funded today

Self-funded. I pay for the hosting, the APIs, the research tools, and the domain out of my own pocket. Total cost to run is under a few hundred dollars a month at current scale. That's sustainable indefinitely at my end, so there's no urgency to monetize.

I'd rather build the thing I wanted to use than rush to make it pay.

The future — if and when this scales

At some point, if this site gets big enough that my hobby budget doesn't cover it, I might need a way to offset costs. Here's my commitment on what that can and can't look like.

Things I might do:

• ✓Contextual ads — clearly labeled, never provider-funded, never in ranking positions
• ✓Affiliate revenue from legitimate telehealth providers — only after they're independently listed based on the research, only clearly disclosed, and never affecting ranking
• ✓Donations — if people want to chip in
• ✓Paid research for third parties — journalists, researchers, policy folks who want custom reports. Work that doesn't touch consumer rankings.
• ✓Licensing the dataset to academic researchers

Things I will never do:

• ✕Sell ranking positions
• ✕Take money to remove a provider from the directory
• ✕Take money to change a Trust Score
• ✕Sell user data or tracking information
• ✕Run ads that look like recommendations

If the day ever comes that the only way to keep this running is to compromise any of the above, I'll shut the site down before I cross that line. Better to have no ProviderIntel than a fake one.

A note on the AI, and the “one-person” part

This is a one-person project, and a lot of the research work is done with Claude Code and other AI tools. I don't hide this — I think it's the most interesting part. A few years ago, a site like this would have required a team of researchers, engineers, and analysts. Today, one person with the right tools and the right discipline can do the same work at a fraction of the cost, and verify it more thoroughly than a team on deadlines could.

The AI drafts. I review. I steer. I make the judgment calls. Every provider page has human eyes on it before it goes live, and every source is linked so you can verify the work yourself. The AI is a research assistant, not an opinion-haver. If you ever spot something that looks AI-slopped — wrong, vague, marketing-speak — tell me. I want to fix it.

How to hold me accountable

If you spot something that looks like I'm breaking these commitments, tell me. You can reach me via the About page. I'll investigate, I'll publish what I find, and if I messed up I'll say so publicly.

If you're a provider on this site and think I got something wrong, contact me. I'll review factual corrections and publish a changelog.

If you're a journalist or researcher who wants to audit the methodology — the full scoring logic, source links for every claim, and data freshness timestamps are all on the site. It's designed to be verifiable. Verify it.

About the person behind this

I go by Tech Farmer online — @realtechfarmr on X. That's not my real name, and that's deliberate. I value privacy and personal sovereignty, and in a space where people get attacked for telling the truth about products and providers, I'd rather keep the work visible and the person pseudonymous. If you want to verify the work, verify the work — it's all on the site, source-linked. The name behind it doesn't change whether the research is right.

I'm a builder who got interested in longevity, got frustrated trying to find legitimate providers, and decided to fix it with the tools I already knew how to use. The Tech Farmer account is where I share what I'm building, including this one. If you want to see the behind-the-scenes, that's where it lives.