Affiliate links: if you buy through links on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.
How PlainSpecs earns money
PlainSpecs is free to read. We earn money through affiliate links: when you buy a product through a link on our pages, the store may pay us a commission. You pay the same price as you would without our link.
That is why every article and page on this site starts with this line:
Affiliate links: if you buy through links on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.
The line is the same for readers in the United States and in the United Kingdom. It opens with the label “Affiliate links” so that you know, before you read, that the page contains links that can earn us money.
Amazon Associates
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
The same sentence appears at the bottom of every page.
Other affiliate programs
We may also join affiliate programs run by manufacturers and retailers, directly or through affiliate networks. Today our only affiliate program is Amazon Associates, through Amazon.com, so for now all our affiliate links go to Amazon. Readers in some other countries, including the United Kingdom, may be taken from Amazon.com to Amazon’s store in their own country, where a qualifying purchase can also earn us a commission. We update this list when we join or leave a program.
How we choose which links to show
- For the main product on a page, the first link goes to the program that pays the highest commission among those we have joined for that product. Often it is the manufacturer’s own store.
- Accessories, such as drives, memory and cables, link to Amazon.
- Pages show both links, so you can choose where to buy.
- Links are set once, in our product records, and not page by page. When we change a program, every page that mentions the product changes with it.
- Affiliate links are marked as sponsored in the page code.
The commission decides which link we show first. It does not decide what the page says about the product.
Prices
We don’t write prices in our pages. Prices change often and differ between stores and countries, so check the current price on the store’s page before you buy. If a page ever shows a price, it will come directly from the store’s own data, with the date and time it was retrieved.
Commissions don’t change the numbers
Every number on a product page comes from the manufacturer’s datasheet or manual, with the document and the date we checked it. A commission cannot change a number. If the manufacturer doesn’t publish a number, we leave it out instead of estimating it.
Comparisons end with a “pick A if, pick B if” summary based on those numbers. We don’t declare an overall winner. How we check the numbers is explained in How we verify.
Cookies set by stores
When you follow an affiliate link, the store’s website may set its own cookies to credit us with the sale. Our pages don’t set them. The details are in our privacy policy.
Questions
Write to steve@plainspecs.com.
Last updated: October 29, 2026