How this site makes money.
CarGearBench is free to read and carries no advertising. It is paid for by commission on things people buy after reading it. That arrangement gives us an interest in what you do next, so you should know exactly what it is.
The statement
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
What that means in practice
Most product links on this site go to Amazon and carry a tracking code. If you follow one and buy something, Amazon pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay the same price either way — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your total, and following our link never costs you anything.
The commission also applies to other things you buy in that session, not only the product we linked to. We have no view of who bought what: the reports we receive are aggregate figures, with no names, no addresses and no payment details.
What the commission does not do
- It does not decide what we recommend. The rate is the same across every product on a page, so there is nothing to gain by steering you to one rather than another.
- It does not decide the order. Products appear in the order the evidence puts them, and each page states the question it is ordering them against.
- It does not buy coverage. We take no payment, no free product and no review unit from any manufacturer in exchange for being included, rated or mentioned.
- It does not follow you. We do not run advertising trackers or sell anything about you. Our own analytics counts pages and outbound clicks in aggregate. Amazon sets its own cookies once you arrive there, under its privacy notice rather than ours.
Programmes we belong to
The Amazon Associates Programme (United States). Should we join another affiliate programme, it will be named here before any link to it is published.
Prices
We do not print prices. Not on a product, not in a table, not in a chart. A price written into a page goes stale the day after it is written, and a stale price is worse than none: it makes a decision for you using a number that is no longer true. The retailer’s own page is the only price that can be right, which is why every button here says “check price” rather than naming one.
Where the relative cost of two products is part of the argument, we say it as a tier — budget, mid, upper, premium — or as a ratio, such as one product costing about a seventh of another. Those are ours, not the tester’s: we assign them from the prices the cited test listed at the time it ran, and the page that makes the argument says so and gives the key.
A tier and a ratio are still point-in-time comparisons. They are steadier than a price, because they only change when two products move differently rather than whenever either one moves — but they can go out of date, and a product can cross from one tier into another. They are there to carry a comparison, never to tell you what something costs today. For that, check the retailer’s page.
The part that matters
A recommendation is worth exactly as much as the evidence behind it, and that is checkable: every measured figure on this site names the source it came from and the conditions it was measured under, and links to them. The comparisons we derive ourselves — price tiers, ratios, arithmetic over someone else’s results — name the figures they were computed from and are presented as ours, never as something a laboratory measured. The method page sets out how a figure earns its way onto a page — including the ones we mark as coming from the manufacturer rather than from an independent test.