Failsafe Home is reader-supported. Some of the links on this site are affiliate links, which means that if you click one and buy something, we may earn a commission. This page explains exactly how that works, what it costs you, and where on this site it does not happen at all.

The short version

• Some links here are affiliate links. Most links are not.
• Using one never costs you more. The price is the same as it would be if you had gone to the seller directly.
• A commission never changes a recommendation, a ranking, or what we choose to warn you about.
• Entire sections of this site, including everything on health and safety, carry no affiliate links whatsoever.

Which programs we are in

At present we work with ClickBank, a marketplace that handles payment and affiliate tracking for a range of digital products. The items we link through ClickBank are books and guides on subjects like food preservation, rainwater collection and backyard growing. When we link to one, we describe it for what it is, we say who it is not for, and we do not repeat any health claim a publisher attaches to it.

We expect to join the Amazon Associates program in the future, mainly so we can link to the ordinary hardware this site talks about: detectors, pumps, heaters, inverters, storage containers. Once that is active, the standard notice applies and will appear where required:

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Until that program is approved and live, hardware articles on this site do not carry affiliate links at all. Where you see a call-to-action box on a power, water, heating, sanitation or detector article, it points at another page on this site, not at a store.

What it costs you: nothing

An affiliate link is a tracking parameter, not a surcharge. The seller pays a share of a sale it would otherwise have kept, out of its own margin. You pay the same price, you get the same product, and you deal with the same seller for delivery, warranty and refunds. If a product has a money-back guarantee, that guarantee is between you and the seller, and it works exactly as it would have if you had never seen this site.

Affiliate links do involve cookies set by the merchant or the network, which is how a sale gets attributed. That is described in more detail on our privacy policy page.

Why it never changes a verdict

The order of operations is what protects you here. We research a question, run the numbers, and write the conclusion first. Only after the verdict exists does anyone check whether an affiliate link happens to be available for it. That means the recommendation cannot be bent toward the payout, because the payout is not known while the recommendation is being made.

A few consequences of that, which you can check against any page here. We frequently recommend things we earn nothing from, including doing nothing at all when the cheapest fix is a habit rather than a purchase. We name the drawbacks of products we do link to, because a recommendation with no downsides listed is an advertisement. And we refuse categories no matter what they pay: free-energy generators, machines that claim to make cheap drinking water out of the air, miracle batteries, and anything encouraging readers to stockpile medication. Those exclusions are written into our editorial policy and they are not negotiable by commission rate.

Where there are no affiliate links at all

Some subjects should not have a purchase attached to them, so they do not. Our health and safety coverage carries no affiliate links in any form. That includes carbon monoxide, hypothermia and heat illness, food-borne illness and botulism, water contamination, and anything about recognizing symptoms or deciding when to call for help. If you are reading a page on this site that is telling you when to get to an emergency room, nobody is being paid for what it says.

The same applies to the safety warning boxes that appear inside otherwise commercial articles. A warning about carbon monoxide from a generator, or about the difference between water-bath and pressure canning, is never a lead-in to a product. We also carry no paid guest posts, we do not sell links inside existing articles, and we do not accept payment to remove a criticism.

How links are labeled

Pages that contain an affiliate link carry a short disclosure at the end of the article, and affiliate links themselves are marked as sponsored in the page code so that search engines and browsers can see them for what they are. If a page has no disclosure at the bottom, it has no affiliate link in it.

This disclosure is made in the spirit of the Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on endorsements and testimonials, which asks sites to make material connections clear and conspicuous. If you think anything here falls short of that, tell us through the contact page and we will fix it. For the wider picture of why this site exists, see about Failsafe Home, and for what our content is and is not, see the disclaimer.