How We Make Money
The short answer: a few What to Buy pages earn a small commission through Amazon Associates links: nothing more. No sponsored placements, no ads, no paid reviews. The links are always disclosed on the page, and the recommendation never changes because of them. Here's the whole policy, in plain language.
The promise
- No paid placement disguised as ranking. Nobody can pay to appear in our guides.
- No selling your parent's (or your) information. We don't collect it, and we will never sell leads or phone numbers.
- "Buy nothing" is always a valid recommendation. Our What to Buy guides include it on every page.
- Recommendations are independent of any payment. We earn from a link only if you buy through it: the recommendation was written before and without regard to the payment, and every guide still tells you who should skip it and whether buying nothing is reasonable.
What we do now
Amazon Associates links on a few What to Buy pages. Where a guide discusses a product category (call-blocking devices, medical alert systems, night lighting, TV remotes, video doorbells), it may link to an Amazon search for that category using our affiliate tag. If you buy through one of those links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Every affected page carries this disclosure near the links:
"We may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. That does not change our rankings or what we recommend."
And per our editorial policy: every commercial recommendation still answers who it's for, who should skip it, the evidence, the tradeoffs, and whether buying nothing is reasonable. A commission never changes those answers.
What we might do later, and the order
- Product affiliates (simple remotes, call blocking, night lights, and similar): only after the guides above them are genuinely useful on their own.
- Service referrals (senior move managers, home-modification contractors, junk removal): only after a trust foundation, with providers ranked independently and any payment marked.
- Newsletter sponsorship: only with a real audience, clearly labeled, and never dictating coverage.
- Membership: only after repeated use is demonstrated; we will not launch a subscription because it sounds attractive.
- Display ads: deferred until meaningful traffic, and never on tool pages or safety-critical flows.
We will not sell leads, broker your parent's information to multiple providers, or route any payment through a system you can't see. If a revenue path ever starts hurting readers' trust, we will kill it: that's a standing promise, not just marketing.
Why we built it this way
This category is full of predatory lead generation, and the strongest long-term asset a site like this can have is trust. We'd rather be the site families save, share, and come back to than the one that monetizes a panic moment. The tools stay free and private: that's not a promotion, it's the product.