The short version: when you buy through a link here, the retailer pays me a commission and you pay the same price. Nobody sends me free gear, nobody pays for a verdict, and every product I own is labeled Bought at retail.
Owned & Tested 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.
When you click a "Check price" button or a product link and buy something, I may earn a commission. It costs you nothing. The retailer pays it. A few links go through Kizer's and CIVIVI's own affiliate programs instead of Amazon. The discount codes on the deals page pay the same way: a commission on the brand's side, the same price for you. I am also signed up with eBay Partner Network and some tool-retailer programs, though no link on the site goes through them today.
What that money never buys: placement in a guide, a softer verdict, or a spot in a comparison table. What it does buy is the next knife, which was going to happen anyway.
Everything I own on this site I bought at retail. So far nobody has sent me anything, and no review here is sponsored or paid for. The line at the top of every page is not a boast. It is a status report. If that ever changes, the label on that product says so, in the first paragraph, on every page where it appears. It sits on the product, not buried on this page.
Where a product loses a test, I say so, paid link or not. Some guides carry a paid link to a product I tell you to skip. That is not a business model. It is there so you can see what I mean.
Paid links are marked rel="sponsored nofollow" so search engines know, and every page with a paid link says so in one line above the first one. If you find a page where that is not true, tell me and I will fix it.
How a verdict gets decided is on the How I decide page. Who is behind this is on the about page.
The knife drawings on this site are drawn to the makers' published dimensions, and the pictures behind some page headings are generated illustrations, not photos of my gear. They are decoration. Nobody should buy a knife because a background looked moody. No image on this site is offered as proof that I own anything. The ownership claims live in the text and in the labels below, never in a picture. There are no photos of my gear on this site. The photos on the reader carries page are readers' own.
Three labels, and they are the only three:
A product with no label is researched only: I do not own it, the page says so, and it names who did test it. A sent knife gets the Sent by the maker label, never Bought at retail, and it is not scored more gently than one I bought. If a maker ever sends something, reads the review, and never sends anything again, that is the system working.