Affiliate Disclosure: How Spice Insider Earns Money (Without Selling Out)
We earn commissions when readers buy products through our links. Here’s exactly how that works, why it doesn’t affect our recommendations, and what it means for the trust you place in our guides.
The Short Version
Here’s what you need to know, in plain language:
- Some links on Spice Insider are affiliate links. When you click one and buy something — usually on Amazon — we may earn a small commission, typically between 1% and 4% of the purchase price.
- This costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is identical whether you use our link or go directly to the retailer. The commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your wallet.
- Affiliate commissions never influence our picks. We don’t rank products based on commission rates. We don’t accept payment for placement. Our top overall pick in any guide earned that spot because of how it performed in our testing, full stop.
- You don’t have to use our links. If you’d rather navigate to a product directly, our guides are still free and useful. The information is here whether or not we earn anything from your purchase.
- We don’t run ads or sponsored content. Affiliate commissions are our only source of revenue. No banners, no pop-ups, no paid posts — just honest guides funded by readers who choose to buy through our links.
How Affiliate Links Work
If you’ve never thought about how product review sites make money, here’s the mechanics — explained without the jargon:
A Simple Breakdown
- We test and review a product — like the Cuisinart SG-10 electric spice grinder. We buy it ourselves, use it in a real kitchen, and form our own conclusions about what it’s good at and where it falls short.
- We publish our findings in a guide or review, along with a link to where you can buy the product if you’re interested. That link contains a small tracking code that tells the retailer (usually Amazon) that you arrived from Spice Insider.
- If you click the link and make a purchase — not necessarily the specific product we linked, but anything you buy during that shopping session — the retailer records that we referred you.
- We earn a small commission on qualifying purchases. The exact percentage varies by product category, but it’s typically in the 1–4% range. On a $40 spice grinder, that’s somewhere between $0.40 and $1.60.
- The price you pay does not change. The commission is paid by the retailer out of their own margin, not added to your total. You pay the same amount whether you use our link, search for the product directly, or walk into a physical store.
Affiliate links also use cookies to track referrals. When you click one of our links, Amazon (or another retailer) places a temporary cookie on your device that tells them Spice Insider sent you. If you buy something within that cookie window — typically 24 hours for Amazon — we may earn a commission. If you clear your cookies, use a different device, or the cookie expires before you purchase, we don’t earn anything, even if our review influenced your decision.
For more detail on how cookies work on our site specifically, see our privacy policy.
Our Promise to Readers
Affiliate revenue creates an inherent tension for any review site: the products we recommend are also the products we earn from. We take that tension seriously, and we’ve built our entire editorial process around resolving it honestly rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
We Test Before We Recommend
Every grinder that appears as a top pick in our guides has been used in a real kitchen, grinding real spices, by someone on our team. We don’t publish recommendations based on spec sheets, Amazon star ratings, or manufacturer claims alone.
We Buy Our Own Review Units
We purchase every product we review at retail price. We don’t accept free samples from manufacturers. This removes any pressure — real or perceived — to soften criticism in exchange for access.
We Don’t Rank by Commission Rate
Our rankings are based on performance, features, and value — not on which product pays the highest affiliate percentage. In fact, we don’t even check commission rates before finalizing our picks. The editorial decision comes first; the affiliate link comes after.
We Tell You What’s Wrong
Every product card in our guides includes a “Cons” section alongside the “Pros.” If a grinder has a recurring durability complaint, a small capacity limitation, or a cleaning quirk, we say so — because hiding flaws to boost sales would erode the trust that makes this site worth visiting in the first place.
Why We Chose the Affiliate Model
There are several ways a site like Spice Insider could fund itself. We chose affiliate commissions deliberately — not because it’s the most lucrative model, but because it aligns most closely with our values:
Why Not Ads?
Display advertising — the banners, pop-ups, and auto-playing videos that fund most of the web — creates the wrong incentives. Ad-supported sites are rewarded for maximizing page views and time on site, which pushes toward clickbait headlines, content padded to keep you scrolling, and pages broken across multiple URLs to inflate ad impressions. We’d rather have you find the answer quickly and get back to cooking than trap you in an infinite scroll. Affiliate revenue rewards us for being genuinely helpful — if our recommendation leads to a purchase, we earn something. If it doesn’t, we don’t. The incentive is to be accurate and trustworthy, not to waste your time.
Why Not Sponsored Content?
Sponsored posts — where a brand pays for placement or coverage — create an even more direct conflict of interest. When a manufacturer is writing the check, the pressure to say positive things is immediate and often contractual. We don’t accept sponsored content, paid placements, or “partner” posts. Our editorial independence is not for sale, and we’d rather earn modestly from many reader purchases than substantially from a few brand deals that compromise our ability to be candid.
Why Not a Paywall or Subscription?
We want this information to be freely available to anyone who needs it. A spice grinder buying guide shouldn’t be locked behind a subscription — cooking is already expensive enough. Affiliate commissions let us keep the site open and free while still covering hosting costs, purchasing review units, and compensating the people who write and test. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s the one that best balances accessibility, independence, and sustainability.
No Free Products, No Sponsored Posts
This is worth stating plainly because it’s the single most important policy we have: we do not accept free products from manufacturers for review. Every grinder, every accessory, every item that appears in our guides was purchased at retail price through the same channels you’d use.
Why does this matter? Because when a brand sends you a free product, there’s an unspoken relationship that forms — even if no explicit agreement exists. The brand knows you have their product. You know they gave it to you. Future access, future review units, future communication all exist in the shadow of that initial transaction. We remove the shadow entirely by paying for our own gear.
We also don’t:
- Accept payment or incentives for product placement
- Allow manufacturers to review or approve our content before publication
- Modify reviews or ratings based on brand requests
- Participate in “influencer” campaigns, brand ambassador programs, or sponsored social media posts promoting products we cover editorially
If a brand reaches out offering free product samples, we decline. If they offer to “sponsor” a review or guide, we decline. Our only financial relationship with the products we cover is through the affiliate links you see on the site — and even those are added only after our editorial decisions are finalized.
What It Costs You: Nothing Extra
Using an affiliate link does not increase the price you pay for a product. The commission comes from the retailer’s side — Amazon or another store pays us a small referral fee out of their own revenue. Your checkout total is the same regardless of whether you arrived through our link, a search engine, or by typing the URL directly.
In fact, using our links can sometimes save you money indirectly — we regularly update our guides when prices drop or when a product goes on sale, and our links will take you to the current listing at whatever price is live at that moment.
How to Support Spice Insider
If you’ve found our guides helpful and want to support the site, here are a few ways to do that — some that cost money, and some that don’t:
- Buy through our links. If you’re planning to purchase a product we recommend anyway, using our affiliate link earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. This is the most direct way to support the site financially.
- Share our guides with other cooks. If a guide helped you, sending it to a friend who’s also shopping for a spice grinder helps more people find our work. Word of mouth is how independent sites grow.
- Send us feedback. Telling us what was helpful — and what wasn’t — makes our work better over time. Constructive criticism is genuinely valuable to us.
- Don’t use our links if you’d rather not. Seriously. If you’re uncomfortable with affiliate marketing, navigate to the product directly. The information in our guides is there to be used regardless. We’d rather have you as an informed reader than feel pressured into a purchase you’re not fully comfortable with.
Questions About Our Affiliate Relationships?
If anything on this page is unclear, or if you have a question about how a specific link or recommendation works, we want to hear from you. Transparency only works if it’s actually transparent — and that means being willing to answer follow-up questions.
- Email: hello@spiceinsider.com (use subject line “Affiliate Question” for faster routing)
- Contact form: spiceinsider.com/contact/
We read every message and respond to as many as we can, typically within a few business days.