- Some links may be 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
Right now, none. PedalToolbox is new, and we haven't joined any affiliate program yet — so at the time of writing there are no commissions to earn on this site at all. We're publishing this page early because the standards below are the ones we intend to hold to from the first link onward, and it seems fair to state them before there's money involved rather than after.
As soon as we join a program, it will be named here, along with any disclosure wording that program requires.
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 physics the calculators run. If the numbers favor a product that pays us nothing, that's the one we name.
- We say when cheap wins. Plenty of the best answers in cycling are unglamorous and unprofitable: the free kilogram off the rider that matches a four-figure wheelset, the tire pressure change that outperforms new wheels, the smaller ring instead of a new drivetrain, sugar and bananas doing the job of race fuel. We publish those anyway, because they're correct — several already have whole pages making the case.
- 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.
A bike site that recommends whatever pays best gets read once. One that tells you the $2,400 wheelset buys nine seconds on a big climb — and that the half-empty bottle saves the same grams for free — gets bookmarked, and the trust is worth more than the wheelset. That's not altruism; it's the business model. The honest answer is the one that brings you back before the next upgrade.
Where you'd see affiliate links
When they exist, mainly two places: gear pages, where we compare specific equipment, and occasionally in a calculator result where naming a real product makes the number easier to act on — "your rim needs a 30 mm tire" next to an actual 30 mm tire. Any page carrying affiliate links will say so near the top, and the footer of every page on the site carries the same notice.
Links to manufacturer documentation, standards bodies, published research (like the Martin power model) and community resources are never affiliate links. Those are references, and we'd cite them regardless.
Prices and availability
Prices change, stock runs out, and manufacturers revise models without changing the name. Anything we quote was accurate when written, and the retailer'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 of what this site computes points the other way: the right pressure for the tires you own, the gears you already have used better, training built on a $0 field test. The gear pages, when they arrive, will exist for when you've decided you need equipment — not to talk you into needing it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you ever 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.