Affiliate disclosure

This page is the disclosure the Federal Trade Commission expects from a site like ours, written in plain English rather than in the smallest legible type we could find. If anything here is unclear, email info@sensorandlatch.com and we will rewrite it.

Amazon Associates

Sensor & Latch 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.

Amazon is currently the onlyprogram we earn from. Every earning link on this site goes to Amazon.com. We link to a handful of manufacturers' own stores where they are genuinely the better place to read a spec sheet or buy a spare part, but those links are plain and untracked — we are not in those programs and we earn nothing from them. If that ever changes, this page changes with it, before the links do.

What the commission does and does not do

• It does not change your price. The commission is paid by the retailer out of its own margin. You pay exactly what you would pay by typing the product name into Amazon yourself.
• It does not determine our picks. Commission rates never enter the ranking. They are not a scoring metric, they are not a tiebreaker, and the person writing a page is not shown them. Several of our top picks are cheaper products that pay us less than the ones they beat.
• It does not buy inclusion.No brand has ever paid to appear on this site, and no brand has seen a page before it published. We do not run sponsored posts, paid placements, or “partner content.”
• It does not stop us saying no.Every ranked product carries a “Skip this if” line naming a real reason to walk away, including on the products we recommend most.

How our links are built

We would rather over-explain this than have you wonder about it.

The /go/ redirect

Buy links on this site do not point straight at Amazon. They point at a path on our own domain that looks like /go/amazon?to=..., which immediately redirects you to the destination with our Amazon Associates tag attached. Nothing else happens in between: no interstitial, no data collection about you, no third-party tracker.

There are two honest reasons for it. First, it keeps the affiliate tag in one configuration file instead of scattered through hundreds of hand-written URLs, which is how sites end up with broken or wrong tags. Second, it lets us count clicks per merchant in our own analytics so we can see which recommendations readers actually find useful. The redirect also refuses to send you anywhere except the merchant it names, so the link cannot be abused to bounce you to an unrelated site.

Link attributes

Every outbound earning link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener". That is the markup Google asks publishers to use to label a paid or affiliate link, and it means the link passes no ranking signal to the retailer. We apply it to every money link on the site, without exception, including in tables and buttons.

The Amazon cookie

When you follow one of our links, Amazon sets a cookie so it can attribute a purchase back to us. Amazon's standard associate window is 24 hours — if you buy within that window, including something completely different, we may earn a commission on it. If you come back a week later and buy, we typically earn nothing. That cookie is set by Amazon, on Amazon's domain, under Amazon's privacy notice, and we cannot read it. What we collect on our own site is described in our privacy policy.

Prices

Prices on this site are pulled live from Amazon's product API and shown with the date and time they were last checked. We never type a price into an article, a table or a heading, because a hardcoded price is wrong within days and every site in this category is full of them.

If our price data goes stale — more than 48 hours old — the number disappears from the page entirely and the link falls back to a plain “check price on Amazon.” A missing price is honest. A stale one is not, and it is also the fastest way to annoy a reader who clicks through expecting a figure that no longer exists. Whatever Amazon shows you at checkout is the price that governs; ours is a snapshot, not an offer.

How we choose what to recommend

The selection process is published in full on our methodology page: which products qualify, which document each spec has to come from, how the five-year cost-to-run arithmetic is computed with a worked example, what disqualifies a product outright, and how often each page is checked again. It is written so that you could reproduce any ranking on this site from the same public sources.

It is worth being blunt about the one thing that structure cannot fix: we make money when you buy something, so we have an interest in you buying something. What we can do — and do — is publish the criteria in advance, tell you plainly when the answer is to buy nothing, and put a disqualifying “Skip this if” on every pick. The independence rules we hold ourselves to are set out in our editorial policy.

Who we are

Sensor & Latch is owned and operated by Type 5 Marketing LLC, United States. There is more about who runs and writes the site on the about page.

Questions about this disclosure, or about a specific link on a specific page, go to info@sensorandlatch.com or through the contact form. We will answer honestly, including about how much a given link is worth to us.