How we make money

Affiliate commission, and nothing else. When you click through to a retailer and buy something, that retailer pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay the same price either way. Our one program is Amazon Associates, and every retailer link on the site today goes to Amazon.

The three questions, answered

Does commission affect how we rank things?

No. Ranking is computed from two inputs — how deep the discount is against the price history we recorded ourselves, and how recently we saw it — and the commission rate is not one of them.

Does commission affect what gets included?

No. A product is listed because we are tracking its price, not because it pays.

Has any merchant paid for placement?

No. Not once, and there is nothing to buy: we do not sell placement, sponsored slots, “featured deal” positions or newsletter inclusion. There is no rate card because there is no product.

What we do not do

• No display advertising. No banners, no interstitials, no pop-ups, no auto-playing video.
• No paid reviews or gifted-product posts. Nobody sends us hardware in exchange for coverage.
• No selling or renting your data. There is none to sell: this site runs no analytics at all, holds no accounts, and keeps no email list. Privacy.
• No inflated “was” prices. The strikethrough on a card comes from prices we watched, not from a retailer’s claim — which is the single easiest way for an affiliate site to manufacture a discount that earns a click. How we verify prices.

Where the money changes what you see — the honest part

One place, and it is structural rather than editorial: our outbound links carry affiliate tags. Amazon links are the exception in shape, not in kind — they go direct to Amazon rather than through our /go/ redirector, because the Associates operating agreement forbids redirecting Special Links. Amazon product images are hotlinked from Amazon and never copied onto our servers, for the same licensing reason.

The commercial pressure on a site like this is to overstate discounts, because a bigger number earns more clicks. Our answer is the 10-observation threshold before we will draw a chart or print a percentage at all, and the rule that a claimed list price we have never observed gets its strikethrough suppressed. Those rules cost us clicks on purpose.