Affiliate and sponsorship disclosure
Most sites write this page after the money starts. We are writing it first, so the commitments are on the record while they are still easy to make.
As of 24 August 2026: Garage Setups has no affiliate agreements, no sponsorships and no advertising. Not a single link on this site earns us a commission today.
Last updated 24 August 2026
The current position, precisely
- No affiliate programme memberships — not Amazon Associates, not any retailer, not any network.
- No affiliate tracking parameters are appended to any outbound link.
- No sponsored placements, featured slots or paid category takeovers.
- No display advertising.
- No paid brand relationships of any kind.
The database has a field marking whether a merchant link is an affiliate link, and today it is false on every row. The interface already renders an ad label from that field, so labelling is live before any commercial link exists.
What we intend to do
The plan is to fund the site primarily through affiliate commissions on product links, and later through clearly-marked brand sponsorships in specific categories. That is a normal model, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend the site runs on goodwill.
The rules we are committing to now
1. Products are never ranked by what pays
Ordering on the product pages is driven by how many real published setups a product appears in. A commission will never move a product up a list, into a “recommended” slot, or onto a setup profile it does not belong on.
2. Every commercial link is labelled individually
Not a single line of small print at the bottom of the page. Each affiliate link carries a visible marker at the point of the click, plus rel="nofollow sponsored" in the markup.
3. Contributors decide what goes on their build
A setup profile’s product list is whatever the owner said they used. We will not insert products into someone’s build, and we will not add an affiliate tag to a contributor’s link without telling them and labelling it.
4. Sponsorship never buys editorial
If a brand ever sponsors a category, that will be a clearly-marked placement in a fixed slot. It will not change which builds surface, what a cost aggregate says, or how a product is described.
5. No invented prices or availability
We do not publish current prices or stock status, because we cannot keep them accurate and a stale price is a lie with a timestamp. Where a price appears, it is what a specific owner reported paying at the time and it is labelled that way.
6. Nothing implies a partnership that does not exist
Brand names appear on this site because contributors used those products. That is not an endorsement, an affiliation, or a partnership, in either direction. All trademarks belong to their owners.
How outbound links work technically
Every merchant link routes through a redirect on our own domain. That endpoint looks up the destination stored against the product, re-validates it (https only, no private or loopback addresses, no credentials in the URL), strips the referrer, and marks itself noindex. It never accepts a destination URL supplied in the request.
That single gateway is also where affiliate tagging would eventually be applied — in one auditable place, rather than scattered across templates. Today it applies nothing.
When this changes
This page is updated before any commercial arrangement goes live, not after. It will name the programmes, say which merchants are involved, and give the date it started. The methodology page is updated at the same time if anything about the data changes.
If you ever see a link on this site that looks commercial and is not labelled, tell us — that is a bug, and we will treat it as one.