How This Site Makes Money

The required statement

Forge & Forever 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. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Which links earn

Every product link on this site is an affiliate link. They are marked #ad under each buy button, and they carry the rel="sponsored nofollow" attribute required by search engines.

Links go through a redirect on this domain (/go/...) before reaching Amazon. That exists so a product’s destination can be changed in one place if a better retailer becomes available, rather than requiring every article to be rewritten. It does not track you and it carries no cookies of our own.

Links in article text that go to a brand’s own site - a warranty document, a specification page - are not affiliate links and earn us nothing. They are there as citations.

What it costs you

Nothing. The commission comes out of Amazon’s margin, not out of your price. You pay exactly what you would pay going to Amazon directly.

If you would rather we did not earn anything, search for the product on Amazon yourself. We mean that genuinely: the information on this site is the same either way.

Which retailers we use, and why only one

At launch, Amazon only. We are not members of any other affiliate network, and we will not build a tracked link for a program we have not joined - that would be dishonest about where your click is going.

We also declined a program we could have joined. A watch subscription box was available to us on a network we do have access to, with a high payout. It is a monthly mystery-watch subscription, which directly contradicts everything this site says about buying once and keeping it, so it does not appear anywhere here. That decision cost us money and it was the obviously correct one.

How prices work

Prices on this site are pulled live from Amazon’s catalog and stamped with the date they were read. They change constantly and we do not control them.

If a price is missing, or older than 48 hours, it disappears automatically and the button falls back to “Check price”. There is no price field anywhere in our content, so it is structurally impossible for a stale number to be published here - the failure mode is silence, never a wrong figure.

What a commission does not change

Commission rates vary by category, which creates an obvious incentive to push whatever pays best. The test of whether a site resists that is not what it promises - it is what it is willing to publish against its own interest. On this site:

• A $20 cast iron skillet is the top pick in a category where we could be pushing a $300 French pot.
• We tell you that most Blundstones cannot be resoled, on a page where Blundstone is one of the products we link to.
• We decline to recommend retractable dog leashes at any price - an entire product category removed from our own catalog.
• The cheaper boot wins several head-to-head comparisons outright, including against products with higher prices and therefore higher commissions.
• We publish the arithmetic showing that a buy-it-for-life boot only wins narrowly over replacing a cheap one, and only if you actually get it resoled.

No sponsored content, ever

No brand has paid for a position in a list on this site, for a mention, or for a review. We do not accept sponsored posts, paid guest articles or gifted products in exchange for coverage. If that ever changes it will be labeled unmistakably on the page itself, not buried here.

Who we are

Forge & Forever is published by Iron Mako Media. Questions about any of this go to contact@forgeandforever.com or the contact form.

The editorial policy covers how picks are chosen and how corrections are handled, and how we judge durability sets out the method in full.