How we make money

The short version

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, we earn a commission from the retailer. It costs you nothing extra — the price you pay is the same either way. That commission is how the site is funded.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Which links are affiliate links

Every buy button that says "Check price on Amazon" or shows a price and a retailer. Those route through a redirect on our own domain (/go/) before sending you to the retailer, which is how the commission gets attributed and how we can swap a destination later without rewriting an article.

Every one of those links carries a sponsored and nofollow attribute, which is what Google’s guidelines require of a monetized link, and there is an #ad label under every buy button on the site.

Links to the CDC, to standards bodies, to manufacturer documentation and to the retailer listings we read our cross-reference data from are not affiliate links. We earn nothing from those and they exist so you can check our work.

Which links are deliberately not affiliate links

This is the part worth reading. Genuinely custom-fit hot tub covers — the tapered foam kind, made to your measurements — are not sold on Amazon. They are sold direct by specialist makers, and we are not in any of their affiliate programs.

We link them anyway, marked as reference links with a note saying we earn nothing there, because for a waterlogged cover they are the right answer and a universal marketplace cover is not. You can see that handling on the covers roundup and the cover size guide.

We will not build a tracking link for an affiliate program we have not joined, and we will not steer you to a worse product because it happens to be the one that pays.

What the commission does not change

• What we recommend. The ranking on any roundup comes from the criteria published on how we pick, and commission is not one of them.
• What we tell you to skip. Every roundup on this site has at least one product with an explicit "skip this if" verdict, and two of the chemicals we cover are ones most owners should not buy at all.
• Where we send you. See the custom covers case above.
• The price you pay. Affiliate links do not add anything to your cost.

What we do not do

• We do not accept sponsored placements or paid rankings.
• We do not accept free product in exchange for coverage.
• We have never been paid to include, exclude or reorder a product.
• We do not publish prices we cannot verify from a live source. When there is no live price, the button says "Check price" rather than showing a stale number.
• We do not run display advertising, pop-ups, or newsletter gates on our reference material. The maintenance schedule is free and ungated, deliberately.

Where the disclosure appears

The FTC requires affiliate disclosure to be clear, conspicuous and before the link rather than buried at the bottom of a page. On this site that means:

• A disclosure box above the first buy button on every commercial page.
• An #ad label directly under every buy button.
• The Amazon Associates statement in the footer of every page.
• This page, linked from the footer and from every disclosure box.

Analytics and cookies

We use Google Analytics to see which pages people read and which buy buttons get clicked. That click event is the only way we can tell which parts of the site are useful, because retailer reporting does not distinguish between sites. Retailers set their own cookies when you arrive from a link here, which is how the attribution works. Details are on the privacy policy.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation looks commercially motivated, say so. That is a fair challenge and we would rather answer it than have you assume. Contact us, or email info@floatandfilter.com.

This is the plain-language version. The formal statement lives on the affiliate disclosure page, which is also reachable at /disclosure.