Trustpilot is an online review community that's open to everyone to use - customers, businesses and the community. Everyone can use it for free.

Businesses, however, have the option of choosing whether they want to use Trustpilot's free or paid services.

Trustpilot's founder and former CEO, Peter Mühlmann explains the choice of business model and how it's designed to help both businesses and consumers here:

How does Trustpilot’s business model work?

"Trustpilot is entirely free to use for consumers - everybody can just go in and look at what people think, and leave their own opinion.

For businesses, we have a free product and we have a paid product. For free, any business can invite its customers to leave a review, they can reply to the reviews and they can learn from what their customers think about them.

For the paid services, we allow businesses to show the reviews on their website where they can hopefully use them to win more business.

Businesses can automate a lot of manual processes - that saves them costs, and then finally we’re offering them more sophisticated insights about their customers that they can use to take action on and thereby improve their business," Peter Mühlmann, Trustpilot Founder.

Why did you choose this business model?

"I think it’s very important that Trustpilot has a healthy business model so that we can make the right investments, so that we can make it easy for you as a consumer to find the information that you’re looking for, and so that we can invest in staff, in algorithms, in statistics to ensure that the reviews are genuine.

That’s the only reason the reviews are useful - that is if you as a consumer can really trust them," Peter Mühlmann, Trustpilot Founder.