What ethical.net's Alternative Guides Tell You About Each Option

ethical.net's alternative guides are built to answer four practical questions about every option they list: who owns it, how it makes money, whether there is a free plan, and what trade-offs you accept by choosing it. Each guide also carries a "last checked" date and a note on what changed since the previous check, so you can judge how current the information is. The site describes itself as a small, independent guide to tools, products and ideas that do less harm to people, animals and the planet, and says every directory entry goes through the same checklist.

The four things each guide covers

Ownership

For each alternative, the guide states who owns the service or brand. In the Gmail guide, for example, the stated purpose is to show "who owns each ethical email provider." The same ownership question runs through the Facebook guide (for friends, groups, events, Marketplace and messaging) and the Microsoft guide (covering Windows, Office, OneDrive, Teams and GitHub). Ownership matters because it tells you who ultimately controls the service and its direction.

Business model

Each guide explains how the provider makes money. This is the piece that lets you check whether a service's incentives line up with your reasons for switching — for instance, whether an email provider depends on advertising or on paid plans.

Free plans

Where a free tier exists, the guide says so. The Gmail guide explicitly covers "which have free plans," which helps you separate options you can try at no cost from those that require payment. Note that the site's own pages do not state prices; the guides tell you whether a free plan exists, not what paid tiers cost.

Trade-offs

Every guide names the trade-offs rather than presenting an alternative as strictly better. The Gmail, Facebook and Microsoft guides all list "the trade-offs" as a core section, so you can weigh what you give up — features, convenience, network effects — against what you gain.

Transparency: check dates and change notes

Each guide says when it was last checked and what changed. The popular guides carry specific dates:

The site also states that its directory holds 454 alternatives across 43 categories, with 97% re-checked in the last 90 days. Treat those figures as the site's own claims about its coverage and freshness, not as an independent audit.

How to use the guides to make a decision

1. Start from what you want to replace. The directory is sorted by the thing you use today — email services (28 alternatives), search engines (9), browsers (8), messaging (11), social media (19), file sharing (17), streaming (11), smartphones (9), office (12), team collaboration (17), books (45), films and talks (33), and all 43 categories.
2. Read the guide for your category and compare options on the same four dimensions: ownership, revenue model, free plan, trade-offs.
3. Check the date. A recent check date and a clear change note mean the ownership and business-model details are more likely to still hold.
4. Weigh trade-offs against your priority. If avoiding advertising-funded services is your main goal, the business-model section decides it; if cost is the constraint, the free-plan note does.

What the guides do not give you

The guides are comparison aids, not full product reviews. The available material does not show per-option pricing, feature-by-feature scoring, or performance benchmarks. The site also acknowledges that "ethical" is not objective — it defines the term as moving toward less harm to other people, animals and the planet, shaped by six principles from its manifesto. That means the guides reflect a particular set of values; use the ownership and business-model facts to apply your own.

If you know an alternative the site has missed, its homepage includes a prompt to suggest it, which is one way to fill gaps in a category you care about.