Fin & Filter earns a commission when you buy through a link on this site. You pay the same price you would have paid anyway. No brand pays us for a placement, a position or a favorable line, and no brand sees a page before it publishes.
The Amazon Associates statement
Fin & Filter 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. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Practically: our product links carry an Amazon tracking identifier (finandfilter1-20). When you follow one and buy something within Amazon's cookie window, Amazon pays us a percentage of the sale. The percentage varies by product category and is set by Amazon, not by us. It is added to Amazon's margin, not to your price — the item costs exactly what it would cost if you had typed the name into Amazon yourself.
How the links work
Every commercial link on this site passes through our own /go address before reaching the retailer. That is a redirect, not a tracker of you: it exists so that the destination for a product is one config entry we can update in a single place — if a product is discontinued, or a better retailer becomes available, the link changes without any page being rewritten.
Every earning link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" in the page's HTML, which is what Google's link-spam policy requires, and opens in a new tab so you do not lose your place.
Where we currently link
Amazon, and at the moment only Amazon. We have not joined any brand-direct or network affiliate program for this category, and we will not build a tracked link for a program we have not joined. Where a manufacturer's own site is a better place to read a specification, we link it as a plain citation that earns us nothing — those links are marked as sources, not as buy buttons.
Some products here have no verified Amazon catalog entry on file yet, so their buy link goes to a tagged Amazon search rather than a specific product page. We would rather send you to a live search than to a product link we have not verified exists.
What commission does not change
The obvious conflict is real and worth naming: we earn more when you buy more, and more still on a more expensive item. Saying "but we stay objective" is not a control. These are:
- Rankings are arithmetic, published in advance. Picks are ordered by whether a product clears the turnover or wattage figure its intended tank requires. The formula is on how we pick and it does not contain a commission term.
- Every roundup names something not to buy. Including products we would earn on. A shortlist where everything is recommended is a catalog.
- We recommend buying less, routinely. Much of this site argues that the expensive thing is unnecessary and the cheap thing — patience, a test kit, a bigger water change — is what actually works. Cycling a tank properly costs almost nothing and is the most important page here.
- No prices are invented to move a sale. Prices render only from a live data feed and expire after 48 hours. Where there is no live figure the button reads "Check price" rather than showing a stale number.
- No fake urgency. No countdowns, no "selling fast", no invented scarcity. An aquarium purchase should be slower than the shop wants, not faster.
Disclosure on the page itself
The FTC's position is that a disclosure has to be where the reader is, not buried on a page like this one. So every page carrying a buy link says so above the first link, and every individual buy button carries an #ad marker and a link back here. This page is the detail, not the disclosure.
What we do not accept
- Free or discounted products for review. We have accepted none, and the site is written so that accepting them would not help: we do not claim first-hand testing.
- Sponsored posts, paid placements or paid links. None, at any price.
- Guest posts. Everything here is written by the site's author.
- Payment to remove or soften criticism. Nobody has offered; the answer would be no.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a specific recommendation reads as commercially motivated, that is a fair challenge and worth putting to us directly: info@finandfilter.com, or via the contact page. Related reading: our editorial policy and how we pick.