Affiliate Disclosure
We earn a commission when you buy through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. Here is exactly what that does and does not change.
The short version
Sprout & Spectrum is funded by affiliate commission. When you click a buy link on this site and purchase something, we receive a percentage of the sale from the retailer. You pay exactly the same price — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket.
This is disclosed at the top of every page that carries a buy link, above the first link rather than buried in a footer, because a disclosure you find after you have clicked is not a disclosure.
Amazon Associates
Sprout & Spectrum is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. We earn from qualifying purchases.
Amazon is currently the only retailer we earn from. Our outbound buy links pass through a redirect on this domain (/go/) so that the destination for a given product can be updated in one place if a better option for the buyer appears. Every one of those links carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", which is the correct markup for a paid link and tells search engines not to treat it as an editorial endorsement.
What commission does not influence
There is nothing to buy. No manufacturer has paid for a position, a rating or a mention, and there is no rate card because there is no product to sell.
Specifically, and checkably:
- Rankings are not for sale. No manufacturer has paid for a position on any list here, and no rate card exists.
- We accept no free products. Nothing on this site was sent to us, which is consistent with the fact that we have not tested any of it.
- Commission rates play no part in ordering. Our top pick in the shelf category publishes no specifications at all and wins on geometry; our top overall pick wins because its published numbers can be checked against each other. Neither criterion has anything to do with what we are paid.
- We publish the gaps in products we recommend. Three of the nine fixtures we cover publish no photon data, and we say so on every page they appear on — including the pages where we recommend them. A site optimizing purely for conversion would not write that sentence.
Why we do not publish prices
Prices on this site come from a live data layer or they do not appear at all. Where no verified live price exists, the button reads “check price” instead of showing a number.
That is a deliberate constraint rather than an oversight. A price typed into a page months ago is wrong by the time you read it, and a wrong price next to a buy button is worse than no price — it is a small, repeated lie in the most commercially sensitive spot on the page. The same rule is why you will not find fabricated review counts or star ratings here.
Programs we have not joined
Some manufacturers we cover run their own affiliate programs. We are not members of any of them and we do not build tracking links for programs we have not joined. If that changes, this page changes with it, and the criterion for using a different retailer will remain the same one we use now: whether it is better for the buyer, not whether it pays more.
Your recourse
If you would rather not use our links, search for the model number directly — every fixture we cover is named with its exact model, and our page on where to buy grow lights explains how to find the manufacturer’s own spec sheet, which is where all our figures come from anyway. The information on this site is free and stays free either way.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation reads as though it were bought, tell us: info@sproutandspectrum.com. The standards we hold ourselves to are set out in the editorial policy, and the procedure behind every number is on the methodology page.
Sprout & Spectrum is published by Slate Mill Group.