Questions
What this is, where the numbers come from, who pays for it, and what we refuse to publish.
Using it
- Is Income Lab free?
- Yes, all of it. There is no account, no paywall and no sign-up anywhere on the site. The 26 money hacks are free to read and free to act on, and most of them earn us nothing at all: nobody pays us when you claim your own lost super.
- Do I have to give you my email address?
- No. Nothing is gated and nothing on the site needs an address to work. The two-minute check runs entirely in the page's address bar and stores nothing, which is also why you can send someone your result as a link. There is an optional monthly newsletter, and that is the only place an address is ever asked for.
- What is in the newsletter, and how often?
- Once a month at most: what changed across the money hacks, any figure an agency has moved, and the sign-up offers we actually verified that month. Nothing else is ever sent to that address, the list is never sold or shared, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe as the Spam Act requires.
- Is this financial or tax advice?
- No. It is general information, and it points you at the agency that publishes the rule so you can read it yourself. We do not know your circumstances. For anything beyond the straightforward, a registered tax agent or a licensed adviser is the right person, and we say so on the pages where it matters.
The numbers
- Where do your numbers come from?
- Each one comes from the Australian agency that published it: the ATO, ASIC, the ACCC, Services Australia, the Department of Health, the Fair Work Ombudsman, AFCA and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Every page names its source, links to it, and shows the date we read it.
- How do you know the figures are still current?
- Most are re-read automatically. The ATO and the ACCC block automated reads of their web pages, but both publish the same material through routes that are open, so we fetch the agency's own PDF and check that the exact sentence our figure rests on is still in it. Anything that cannot be re-read that way is listed for a person to open before we deploy.
- What happens when a figure changes?
- The check fails and we fix the page. That is the point of running it before every deploy rather than trusting the date we first read something. It has already caught one of our own mistakes and one thing we were missing entirely.
The deals
- Are the discount codes real?
- Every offer is quoted word for word from the brand's own page, with the URL it was cut from, and re-read every day. If it disappears from the brand's page our listing says so rather than quietly staying up. We never copy codes from coupon aggregators, which is where most of the dead ones come from.
- Why are there so few offers listed?
- Because a listing only goes up once we have read it on the brand's own page. When we built the sign-up bonuses page we had drafted eight and published four: two of the others were real on screen but absent from the HTML the brand's server returns, so our daily check could never confirm them.
- What will you not list?
- Bank accounts, insurance and investing sign-up offers. They pay the highest commissions in the country, which is exactly why they are missing: they are financial products, we hold no licence to recommend one, and a page listing them is doing something other than reporting a price.
How we are paid
- How do you make money, then?
- Brands can pay us when one of their offers is used. Nothing else on the site is for sale: no brand can pay for a better position, an editorial listing is never for sale, and the money hacks earn nothing by design. There is a page that sets this out in full.
- Does a brand paying you change what you publish?
- It cannot change the order, because listings are ordered editorially and that is not for sale. It cannot change the wording, because the wording is cut verbatim from the brand's own page rather than written by us or by them.
Who we are
- Who is behind Income Lab?
- Pepform Pty Ltd, ABN 32 660 008 159, based in Melbourne. The same business runs Refer Labs, an Australian comparison site. Income Lab is not a government service and is not affiliated with any of the agencies whose figures it quotes.
- Do you sell my data?
- No. There is no account and no analytics on the consumer pages. We count how many times each offer link is opened, as a number per offer per day, with no cookie, no visitor identifier, no IP address and no user agent recorded. If you subscribe we store the address, when you consented and which page you did it from, and nothing else about you.
For brands
- How do I get my offer listed?
- Listing is free and there is a form on the brands page. You also get a free offer check with it: five questions answered from your own robots.txt and the HTML your server returns, covering whether AI assistants can fetch your offer page, whether they are allowed to quote it, and whether your offer is actually in the HTML they read.
Questions about the money itself
Each of the 26 hacks answers the questions people ask about that one thing: how long a claim takes, whether you need receipts, what happens if the business has closed. They are on the page for the hack, not here.