Disclosure

Tiny Bytes carries no affiliate links today. When it does, these are the rules — written down now, in advance, so you can hold us to them later.

When affiliate links do appear

We plan to join Amazon’s affiliate programme once The Builder column has enough hardware coverage to justify it. When that happens:

Only one column carries links. The Builder — hardware and homelab. The Analyst and The Operator will never carry product links. News and opinion stay clean, because the moment a news post has something to sell you, you can’t fully trust the news post.

Only for the product the post is about. If a link appears, the thing on the other end is the subject of the piece. No “here’s a vaguely related webcam” links on an article about a model release. That trick is the single most common pattern on affiliate sites, it converts terribly anyway, and we don’t do it.

Links go straight to the retailer. No cloaking, no URL shorteners, no redirect hops. You can see where a link goes before you click it.

Nobody buys a verdict. We don’t take payment for reviews, rankings or positive coverage. If a manufacturer sends hardware, the post says so at the top — and “this was free and it’s still not worth your money” is a conclusion we’ll publish.

Every post carrying a link will say so at the top, automatically. The disclosure is built into the site rather than being something a writer has to remember, because things writers have to remember eventually get forgotten.

Commission never changes the price you pay. It comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your wallet.

Other interests you should know about

Affiliate commission isn’t the only way we have a stake in things we write about, and it’s the smallest one. The rest:

We sell the services The Operator writes about. The consultancy behind this site does fractional-CIO work and Microsoft 365 management for small businesses. That is the paying job; Tiny Bytes is not. But The Operator covers licensing, governance, security add-ons and Copilot rollouts — the exact ground that paying job stands on, which is the exact ground where you should want to know who is talking. The rules we hold ourselves to:

• No client ever appears here. Not named, not described, not anonymised into an example. Nothing learned inside an engagement becomes a post.
• No commission on anything you buy, from anyone. We earn nothing when you act on advice here — no vendor rebate, no reseller margin, no Microsoft partner-programme payment, no referral fee. The only money this site could ever make from a purchase is Amazon affiliate commission on hardware, under the rules above.
• “Hire us” is never the conclusion. There is no services page on this site, no consultation call-to-action and no contact-us-for-a-quote footer. The Operator’s job is to leave you able to decide without us, including deciding against us.
• Advice that costs us money still runs. “Don’t buy the add-on” and “you could do this yourself in an afternoon” are conclusions that lose consultancies work. They are in the archive.

We own software too. Dashable and VisionMixer are our own products. If a post ever covers a category either one competes in, it will say so in the post, not only here.

The editor’s YouTube channel is sent hardware. Manufacturers send units to that channel for review. It is a standing relationship with hardware vendors that exists outside this site, so it is declared here as well — and The Builder’s own rule is that any post about a unit we did not pay for says so at the top of the post.

If we ever hold a stake, the post says so. No equity, options or advisory position in a company a post covers will go undisclosed. We expect that line to stay theoretical. It is the policy either way.

No sponsored posts

We don’t run them. If that ever changes, this page changes first, and sponsored content will be labelled as sponsored in the headline — not in a line under the footer.

Questions

[email protected]. If you think a link on this site breaks one of the rules above, that’s worth an email and we’ll either fix it or explain ourselves in public.