- Some links are affiliate links. Buy through one and we may earn a commission.
- You never pay more. The price is identical whether you use our link or go direct.
- Commissions don't pick the winner. Products are chosen on specs and math, and we say so when the cheapest option is the right one.
- Nothing here is paid placement. No sponsored posts, no money for a spot on a list.
How affiliate links work
When you click an affiliate link, you go to the retailer's own site as normal. Their system records that the visit came from us, usually with a cookie, and if you buy something within their attribution window they pay us a small percentage. The price you pay is exactly the same — the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.
We never see your name, your order, your payment details, or what you bought. At most we see an anonymous count of sales attributed to the site. Our privacy policy covers the data side in full.
Which programs we're in
We currently participate in the following programs:
- Amazon Associates — heaters, filters, controllers and smaller equipment
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
How we decide what to recommend
This is the part that matters, so here are the actual rules:
- The math picks first. Our recommendations follow from the same formulas the calculators run. If the numbers favor a product that pays us nothing, that's the one we name.
- We say when cheap wins. A great deal of good fishkeeping is unglamorous and barely profitable, and we publish it anyway: baking soda instead of bottled reef buffer, Epsom salt from the pharmacy for magnesium, a $15 kitchen scale being the most useful thing a reefer can own, more frequent water changes instead of a nitrate-removing additive, and an auto top-off instead of chasing salinity every week.
- No paid placement, ever. Nobody can buy a mention, a ranking, a review, or a link. We don't accept sponsored posts, paid guest articles, or link exchanges.
- No pay-to-play rankings. Where we compare products, the order is set by specifications and suitability. Commission rates are not a factor, and a higher-paying product does not get moved up.
- We disclose gifted products. We don't currently accept free samples. If that ever changes, any product we were given will be labeled as such on the page where it appears.
An aquarium site that recommends whatever pays best gets read once. One that tells you the $3 box of baking soda raises alkalinity exactly like the $20 tub of "reef buffer" — because it's the same compound — gets bookmarked, and the trust is worth more than the tub. That isn't altruism, it's the business model: the tanks that stay running are the ones whose owners come back, and eventually some of them do need a skimmer.
Where you'll see affiliate links
Mainly two places: our gear comparisons, where we look at specific equipment — filters, return pumps, skimmers, reef lighting, RODI systems, heaters — and occasionally in a calculator result where naming a real product makes the number easier to act on: "you need 723 g of salt for this batch, which is most of a 22 lb bucket." Any page carrying affiliate links says so near the top, and the footer of every page on the site carries the same notice.
Links to product labels, manufacturer instructions, published chemistry and the reef and freshwater communities we cite are never affiliate links. Those are references, and we'd link them regardless.
Prices and availability
Prices change, stock runs out, and manufacturers revise products without changing the name — salt mixes and additives in particular get reformulated while the bucket looks identical. Anything we quote was accurate when written, and the retailer's or manufacturer's own page is always the authority at the moment you buy. If you find something out of date here, tell us and we'll fix it.
One thing this page isn't
A recommendation to buy anything. Most aquarium problems are solved by testing your water, changing some of it, and dosing what the numbers say — usually with compounds that cost very little. The gear pages exist for when you've decided you need equipment, not to talk you into needing it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation looks influenced by a commission, say so directly: [email protected]. That's a complaint we take seriously, and one we'd rather hear than not.