Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

PizzaOvenCalc.com 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.

Links to products on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is identical whether you use our link or navigate to the product yourself. Nothing is added to your cost and no discount is withheld.

What that pays for

Every calculator, chart and guide on this site is free and has no advertising interruption, no email wall and no premium tier. Affiliate commission is the entire business model. It pays for the research time, the product verification work, the hosting and the ongoing job of checking that links still point at the products they claim to.

The conflict of interest, stated plainly

We are paid when you buy things, and more when you buy expensive things. That is a real incentive to recommend more than you need, and pretending otherwise would be worse than disclosing it. Four editorial rules exist specifically to counter it, and they are visible on the pages themselves rather than only here.

• Every roundup names who should NOT buy the expensive pick. Not as a formality: the expert tier on each page carries an explicit passage talking a reader out of it where the cheaper tier does the same job.
• Every build guide has a "what you can skip" section that names specific lines and the dollar total of cutting them.
• Where an item is identical across tiers, we say so. The digital scale and the turning peel are the same products on the $334 build and the $2,914 build. Inventing an expensive version of a $17.99 tool would earn more and would be a lie.
• We say when a cheaper category beats a more expensive one. A $139 baking steel in the oven you already own is better value than a pizza oven for anyone who wants New York style pizza, and that is on the page rather than buried.

How products get onto the site

Every Amazon listing here was returned by a product API and then read back by hand to confirm that the title matches the product we mean and the price is sane for the category. Automated product matching gets this wrong regularly, and an affiliate link that sends a reader to the wrong product is the worst outcome available: it is useless to them and it earns nothing.

Where a genuinely good product is not sold on Amazon, and several are not, it gets a scoped Amazon search link rather than a fabricated product listing. Those show a "Find" or "Find on Amazon" button rather than "Check price", so you can tell the two apart. A search link is honest about what it is.

Commodity lines in the build guides, things like a propane cylinder, canned tomatoes or fresh mozzarella, also resolve to search links. There is no single right product for those and pretending there is would be padding.

Why the disclosure is repeated so often

It appears in the footer of every page, under every product card on every money page, and in full here. That is more repetition than the minimum requires, and the reason is that a disclosure buried on a page nobody visits is a formality rather than a disclosure. If you are about to click a product link, you should be able to see the relationship without leaving the page you are on.

Prices

Every price on this site was accurate when the page was compiled and prices change constantly. Treat them as a recent snapshot for comparison rather than a quote, and confirm on the retailer before ordering. Build totals are the sum of the listed prices at compile time and will drift.

What we do not accept

We do not accept payment in exchange for a recommendation, a ranking, or a position on a list. We do not accept free product in exchange for coverage. No manufacturer has any input into what appears on these pages, and no product has ever been added or removed at a manufacturer's request.

We also do not publish hands-on impressions of gear we have not used. Everything here is based on published manufacturer specifications, verified owner reviews and long-established baking practice, and the pages say so rather than implying a test that did not happen.

What a commission actually looks like

Worth stating in concrete terms, because the abstraction hides how small it is. Amazon pays a percentage of the sale that varies by product category and is generally in the low single figures. On a $399 oven that is a few dollars. On a $17 turning peel it is a few cents. The entire site is funded by a large number of very small amounts, which is why we can afford to tell you not to buy the expensive thing.

It also explains a structural point about the site. The build guides earn more per reader than the roundups do, not because they are pushier but because someone buying a complete kit buys twelve items rather than one. That is the honest reason those pages exist and get the most care, and it happens to align with being useful: a reader who buys the list can actually cook that weekend.

Independence in practice

Three concrete examples of the policy doing something rather than just being stated.

• The cheapest oven on the site is recommended as a genuine first purchase, not as a strawman to make the expensive ones look good. It is the anchor of the $334 build and the page explains what it does well rather than apologising for it.
• The $2,914 build opens by telling most readers not to buy it, with four specific groups named. That is the highest-value page on the site and it spends its opening section talking people out of it.
• Some categories are recommended against entirely. Pizza screens are described as training wheels, gadgets that automate a skill worth learning are left off the lists, and several build lines are explicitly marked skippable with the dollar total of cutting them.

Which pages carry affiliate links, and which do not

Being specific about this is more useful than a blanket statement, because the answer is not "all of them".

• The gear roundups and the build guides are money pages. Every product name and every button on those pages is an affiliate link, and that is where essentially all the revenue comes from.
• The oven specification pages carry one link each, to the oven the page is about, plus links to the tools any oven needs. The specifications themselves are unaffected by whether a product is buyable.
• The guides and comparisons link products only where they are named in the prose, because a product mentioned in a sentence should be clickable rather than sending you back to a card.
• The calculators and reference charts are almost entirely link free. A hydration table has nothing to sell and adding something would make it worse.

How to tell the two kinds of link apart

A button reading Check price or Price goes to a specific verified product listing. A button reading Find on Amazon or Find goes to a scoped Amazon search, because there is no single verified listing for that line. Every outbound product link on this site carries rel="nofollow noopener sponsored", which is the standard way of declaring a paid relationship to search engines.

Every page also carries a disclosure in the footer, and money pages repeat it directly under the product cards where the prices are. That repetition is intentional: a disclosure that only exists on a page you have to go looking for is not really a disclosure.

What happens if a recommendation turns out to be wrong

We change it, and we would rather hear about it than not. Products get discontinued, get revised silently between model years, or turn out to have a failure mode that only shows up after a season of use. A recommendation that has stopped being true is a defect in the same way a broken link is, and it is treated the same way.

Report it through the contact page with the page and the product. Wrong product listings in particular are treated as urgent, because an affiliate link that sends a reader to the wrong item is useless to them and earns nothing anyway.

Related pages

The rest of the site is organised in the order the work happens. The calculators do the dough arithmetic, the reference charts carry the same figures as printable lookup tables, and the method guides explain what to do when the dough in front of you disagrees with the numbers. On the equipment side, the oven specification pages cover every model we track, the gear roundups pick products at three tiers, the comparisons settle the head to head questions, and the complete builds put everything together at three budgets with a running total on every line. The about page explains how all of it is put together.

Other programs

We may participate in other affiliate programs from time to time. Any such relationship is covered by this disclosure and by the disclosure that appears in the footer of every page on the site. If you have a question about a specific link, ask through the contact page.

More on how the site works, including how gear is chosen and what we deliberately refuse to claim, is on the about page. Legal terms are on the terms of service and disclaimer pages.