Affiliate disclosure
We earn a commission when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. Here is exactly how that works and what it does not change.
The short version
Rinse & Rail is funded entirely by affiliate commission. When you click a buy link on this site and purchase something, we receive a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise.
There are no ads on this site, no sponsored posts, no paid placements and no relationships with any manufacturer mentioned here.
Amazon Associates statement
Rinse & Rail 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.
Our Amazon Associates tracking tag is fafrinseandrail-20. It is appended to Amazon links by the /go resolver every buy button on this site passes through.
Amazon is the only network we belong to
This is worth stating plainly, because most sites in this category are vague about it.
Rinse & Rail belongs to one affiliate program: Amazon Associates. We have not joined CJ, Awin, ShareASale or any brand-direct program, which means:
- Every earning link on this site is an Amazon link.
- Every other outbound link — to a manufacturer’s specification page, a manual, a standards body, a government dataset — earns us nothing at all.
We link to manufacturer pages constantly, because that is where the specifications are. Those links are references, not revenue. The non-earning merchants currently in our configuration, so you can see the full list rather than take our word for it:
- Moen — not joined — reference link only
- Delta Faucet — not joined — reference link only
- TUSHY — not joined — reference link only
- TOTO — not joined — reference link only
- Bio Bidet by Bemis — not joined — reference link only
- Brondell — not joined — reference link only
- 3M Command — not joined — reference link only
Being Amazon-only is the normal condition of a new publication: no network approves a site that launched last week. If that changes, this page changes with it and the buy destinations become a one-line configuration edit rather than a content rewrite — which is exactly why every link routes through /go in the first place.
How commission does and does not affect what we recommend
The standing rule: the better product for the buyer beats the better-paying link, every time. Where a cheaper product is the right answer, the cheaper product goes at the top, and it loses us money to say so.
Three things follow from that rule, and you can check all three against the site:
Every roundup contains a product we recommend against. The skip this pick never carries a buy button, so it earns nothing. Some of them are products we recommend enthusiastically elsewhere — a full-flow showerhead is our top pick for low water pressure and our skip on the main roundup, because the right answer depends on the reader’s problem rather than on our commission.
We tell you when not to buy at all. The descaling guide exists because a bottle of vinegar fixes a large share of what people diagnose as low water pressure. That page earns us essentially nothing and it is the correct first advice.
We publish what we cannot verify. Several products are ranked down or made the skip pick specifically because their manufacturers publish too little, regardless of what they would pay.
What we do not do
- Accept free products. Nobody has sent us anything, and if they did it would not change a ranking — we have no way to test it anyway.
- Accept payment for placement. No manufacturer can buy a position on this site.
- Run sponsored content. There is none, and if there ever were it would be labeled at the top of the page rather than here.
- Fabricate prices, ratings or reviews. Prices come from a live check or the button says “Check price”. There are no testimonials on this site.
How the links work
Every buy button routes through /go, a redirect on this domain that adds our Amazon tracking tag and forwards you to the product. It exists for two reasons: it lets us change a destination without rewriting an article, and it lets us count buy-clicks so we know which guides are actually useful.
Every earning link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", which is what Google’s link-spam policy requires of paid links, and /go is set to noindex, excluded from our sitemap and disallowed in robots.txt.
Every commercial page also carries a disclosure notice above its first affiliate link, not just here.
Cookies
Clicking an Amazon link sets an Amazon cookie that attributes a purchase to us for a limited window. We do not set that cookie and we cannot read it — it belongs to Amazon, and Amazon’s own privacy policy governs it.
What we do collect is covered on the privacy policy page.
Who publishes this site
Rinse & Rail is published by Fathom & Foundry. There is no client behind it and no advertiser relationship of any kind. It is funded by the commission described above and by nothing else.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation has been shaped by commission, write to info@rinseandrail.com. The method behind every recommendation is published at how we research.