How this site is funded
Affiliate Disclosure
This site earns commission on some of the links it carries. Here is exactly how that works and what it changes.
Last updated
The short version
CakeDecoratingCalc participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising programme that lets sites earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.com. When you follow a product link from this site and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is exactly the same either way. Nothing is added to your cost and no discount is withheld.
That is how the calculators, the charts and the 142 verified product entries are paid for. There is no paywall, no subscription and no sponsored content.
What it does not change
No manufacturer has paid for a placement here, and no brand has been given a preview of what a page would say about it. Commission rates differ between Amazon product categories, and those differences have no bearing on what appears on a page. A cheap tool is recommended over an expensive one wherever the cheap one is the right answer, which happens often: the beginner kit on this site deliberately recommends a plastic turntable and tells you not to buy fondant yet.
Every roundup carries a section saying who should not buy the most expensive pick, because a recommendation that never talks anybody down is not a recommendation.
How products get onto this site
Every product was confirmed live against the Amazon catalogue, and every returned title was read against the product the page claims it is. That is a real check rather than a formality: automatic matching has previously placed entirely unrelated products on pages elsewhere in this portfolio, and a search for a cake pan extender in this category returned shirt collar extenders among the results.
Where a category has no genuine branded product, and several in cake decorating do not, no winner is invented. Russian piping tips, acrylic cake discs, stencils, luster dust and acetate collars are all sold almost entirely under interchangeable seller names on identical tooling. Those pages link a scoped search and say plainly that no brand is worth naming, along with what to judge instead. That earns less than picking one and calling it the best, which is the point.
Prices
Prices shown are the figures Amazon returned when the page was built, and Amazon prices move constantly. Treat every total on this site as an order of magnitude rather than a quote, and check the current price before buying. Where a product has no listed price, the page says so rather than showing a zero, and it is excluded from any running total rather than counted as free.
Tracking
Product links carry a tracking tag so Amazon knows which site the visit came from. This site also uses Google Analytics to count visits and to record which product links are clicked, in aggregate. What we can see is that a link was clicked, not who clicked it or what they eventually bought. The privacy policy sets out what is collected in full.
Other programmes
At present Amazon is the only affiliate programme this site takes part in. If that changes, this page will say so before any such link appears.
Questions about any of this are welcome through the contact page. How the figures themselves are produced is a separate matter and is set out in the methodology.