Affiliate Disclosure
Last updated June 2026
Setup Gear Guide earns a commission when you buy through some outbound links, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here is exactly how that works and the wall between it and our recommendations.
The hard rule
Commissions never influence rankings, scores, compatibility results, or recommendations. The scoring and recommendation engines take no affiliate input — by code structure, not just policy. A product that pays nothing outranks a product that pays well whenever the data says it should.
Amazon Associates
Setup Gear Guide is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Amazon buy links route through our /go redirect and carry our Associates tag; you pay the same price either way.
Because Amazon's terms only allow us to display Amazon prices pulled from their API (which we don't yet use), Amazon options show 'Check price on Amazon' rather than a number until that's in place.
Current status
Amazon links are live affiliate links today, but we can't display Amazon prices yet — Amazon options show 'Check price on Amazon' instead of a number until we use their pricing API (see Amazon Associates above). Other retailers are still plain links while those programs are established. Buttons say 'Check price' and route through our /go redirect either way, which is how we count which retailers people actually use. As more programs activate, links flip to affiliate form with no change in what we recommend.
How offers are ordered
Buy boxes sort user-first: best tracked price, with retailer trust as the tiebreaker. Affiliate status is not a sort input.
"Retailer trust" is a fixed per-retailer score based on factors like authorized-dealer status, return and warranty policy, and fulfillment reliability — not on what they pay us. It only ever breaks ties between equal prices; it can never move a more expensive offer above a cheaper one.
The public API exposes the same data with explicit affiliate and disclosureRequired flags on every offer, so AI agents can carry the disclosure forward.
Free units & sponsorships
We do not accept free product, loaner or review units, or paid sponsorships in exchange for coverage, a ranking, or placement. Every spec, price, and compatibility claim is sourced from citable pages and scored by code.
If that ever changes, this page changes with it, and any such relationship would be disclosed on the affected pages.