Affiliate disclosure

The short version

Steep & Spout earns an affiliate commission when you buy something through a link on this site. It costs you nothing extra — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your price.

Every link that can earn us money is marked #ad beneath the button and carries rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup, which is how search engines are told the same thing you are.

Which retailers we earn from

Steep & Spout is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

That is the entire list. This is a new publication and no other affiliate program has been joined, so there is no other retailer we could earn from even if we linked to one. If that changes, this table changes with it.

What the commission does not change

The honest thing to say is that an affiliate arrangement creates a pressure, and that a promise not to be influenced by it is worth very little on its own. So here is the structural version instead, which you can check.

• Every pick names who should skip it. That line is required by the content model — there is no way to publish a product on this site without one.
• At least one item per roundup is something we tell you not to buy. The tea ball is the clearest case.
• The cheapest correct answer usually wins. We recommend a fifteen-dollar thermometer over a hundred-dollar kettle on several pages. The commission on those two is not close, and the thermometer is still the pick.
• There is a whole page telling you what not to buy. Tea gear you can skip exists on a site that earns money when you buy tea gear.
• Ranking never reflects commission rate. If a better product pays less, it still ranks first.

About the prices

Prices on this site come from an automated check against the retailer and carry the date they were checked. They are not typed into the page by hand and they are never remembered from a previous version.

When a price is older than 48 hours, or when there is no live price at all, the button reads Check price instead of showing a number. A stale price is worse than no price, because it looks like information.

Retail prices change constantly and we cannot promise the figure you see matches the one at checkout. The retailer’s page is always the authority.

About the links themselves

Buy buttons point at a /go/ address on this domain, which immediately redirects to the retailer with our tracking tag attached. That indirection exists so that changing a destination later is a single configuration change rather than an edit to every page that mentions the product.

Those /go/ addresses are excluded from search engines in robots.txt and marked noindex at the header level. They are plumbing, not content.

What we have not done

We have not tested any of the products on this site. There is no lab, no test kitchen and no shelf of kettles. Every recommendation is built from published specifications with their sources named, plus reasoning about what those specifications mean.

That is set out in full on how we pick, and it is the single most important thing on this page, because a claim to have tested things is exactly what an affiliate site has an incentive to make.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation looks commercially motivated, say so: info@steepandspout.com or the contact form. Corrections are handled under the editorial policy.