How this site makes money

The short version

Open Grow Guide may join affiliate programs run by nurseries, seed companies and garden retailers. If you buy something through one of those links, we may receive a small commission from the retailer, at no extra cost to you.

There are no ads on this site.

Current status of links on this site

At the time of this update, Open Grow Guide carries no live affiliate links. This disclosure is published in advance so that it is accurate from the moment the first link appears, and so readers can see our policy before they need it.

The places where such links will sit are already built into the page templates: a "Where to buy" block on a plant page, a "Seeds & starts" block on an edible one, a supplies or treatment list, a buying column in a comparison table. Until a retailer's program has approved this site, that block renders without any link, or is left out of the page entirely.

What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is an ordinary link to a retailer that carries a tracking code for this site. If you click it and make a purchase, the retailer credits that sale to us and pays a percentage of it as a commission.

You pay the same price you would pay going to the retailer directly. Affiliate links don't add fees, change prices, or affect your rights as a buyer.

How affiliate links are labeled

Disclosure sits with the links, not only on this page, so you see it before you click rather than after:

• Every block that carries paid links shows, above its first link, the line "We may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. It doesn't change what we recommend", with a link back to this page. It sits inside the block rather than at the foot of the page, so a reader who arrives partway down still sees it.
• Every paid link is marked for search engines as sponsored and opens in a new tab.
• The site-wide policy is this page, linked from the footer of every page.

How the links are built

Paid links are written into the pages when the site is built, by code, from a list of programs we have actually been approved for. Nothing rewrites links in your browser, and we use no service that turns ordinary links into paid ones behind the scenes.

Three rules are enforced by the build itself, and it fails rather than publish a page that breaks them: a link may exist only for a program that has approved us and whose terms have been read; every link must carry this site's own tracking code, so an untagged link can never ship; and pages about pet toxicity carry no commercial links at all.

A language model never writes a merchant link. Product details such as price come from the retailer's own data feed, and a price is shown with the date it was read, or not shown at all.

How products are chosen

Recommendations are based on what suits the task on the page, durability and value, not on commission rate or program availability.

• No company can pay for a recommendation, a ranking position or a mention. There is no paid placement, no sponsored post and no paid review on this site.
• No company can change a plant fact. Names, care ranges, hardiness and toxicity come from the sources described in our editorial policy, and a commercial relationship is never one of them.
• Where the best option pays us nothing, we still name it.
• Care content is written first and the shopping blocks are added after it, never the other way round.
• No fake scarcity, no invented discounts and no struck-through "was" prices.

"Tested" means tested

Gear guides say a product was tested only where that product was bought and measured, with the measurements published alongside it. Everything else is a buying guide built from the manufacturer's published specifications, each one cited to the manufacturer's own page, and it says so.

We say when we have not personally tested a product and are relying on specifications or third-party testing. No gear page carries a star rating or a review score.

Affiliate cookies and tracking

Clicking an affiliate link may set a cookie in your browser that lets the retailer credit a later purchase to this site. These cookies are set by the retailer, not by us, and are covered by that retailer's privacy policy.

On our side, a click on a paid link is counted in our analytics as an event with the program name, the position on the page and the page it came from, subject to your consent choice. It carries nothing about you. Our own use of cookies and analytics is described in the privacy policy.

Questions about a specific link

If you want to know whether a particular link is an affiliate link, or which program it belongs to, email contact@opengrowguide.com and we will tell you.