How Hearthline makes money
Most mortgage advice is shaped by compensation the consumer never sees — the site that ranks lenders is often paid by the lenders it ranks. Hearthline is built so that conflict cannot exist, and this page states the whole model in public so you can hold us to it.
What consumers pay: nothing
The Loan Estimate decoder, the lender data, and the comparison tools are free. If that ever changes, this page will say so plainly before it does.
What we sell: market reports to lenders, at a flat fee
Hearthline compiles county mortgage-market reports from public federal HMDA filings — volume, pricing medians, market position. Lenders pay a flat fee for that compilation work. The fee is the same whether the lender looks strong or weak in the data, the same whether they buy one report or twelve, and never a percentage of anything. The samples are public — every figure in a paid report comes from the same public data anyone can check.
What we never sell
- Ranking or placement. Lenders appear to consumers ranked only by their own filed data. A report customer gets zero visual or ordering advantage — consumer-facing code cannot reference the compensation field at all, and the release fails to build if anyone tries to wire it in.
- Referrals. We are paid for compilation work actually performed, never for sending a borrower to anyone. No lender pays us per lead, per application, or per closed loan.
- Endorsements. Buying a report does not make a lender "recommended", "featured", or "preferred" — no payment can ever produce those labels here, and nowhere consumers shop is any lender labeled that way. The only recommendation on the platform is a licensed professional's reviewed recommendation of a loan option to their own borrower, and compensation data cannot touch it.
- Your data. Consumer information is never sold, shared with, or shown to report customers. The reports contain only aggregated public filings.
The separation is structural, not a promise
Every deploy runs a neutrality test that fails the release if consumer-facing code references the compensation field — in any spelling — or pulls whole lender records (values and all) into a public page. And every ranking you see must come from verified public metrics; when the data can't answer your priorities, Hearthline says "we can't rank this honestly" instead of guessing.
Where the numbers come from: Sources · The data itself: lender market page · For lenders: what a report includes