Affiliate disclosure

The disclosure

What that means in practice

• Most product links here are affiliate links. Every one is marked `#ad` under the button and carries `rel="sponsored nofollow"` in its markup, which is what Google asks for.
• It costs you nothing. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your price.
• The commission is a percentage of the sale, set by Amazon per product category, not by us and not per product.
• We do not know who bought what. Amazon reports aggregate commissions. We cannot see your order and would not want to.

What it does not change

This is the part that matters, and the easiest claim in the world to make emptily. So here is the evidence rather than the assurance.

• Rankings come from published specifications and our own arithmetic, applied through a five-metric rubric that is published in full on how we pick. You can check the inputs.
• Several of our top picks are the cheapest products in their category. The best value per linear filing inch on this site is a 40-dollar budget cabinet. The highest-value purchase anywhere here is a 17-dollar door sweep. Neither is where the commission is.
• Every pick carries an explicit reason to skip it. A roundup where everything wins is a roundup that was written for the links.
• We regularly tell people not to buy the expensive thing. Our office pod pages lead with the suggestion that 600 dollars of panels and a 17-dollar seal solves the problem for most readers, and a pod costs 3,200.
• We rank one product last on purpose and explain why, rather than omitting it, because it is the most-bought thing in its category and readers deserve to know what it does not publish.

Prices

• Every price shown comes from a live data layer refreshed daily from Amazon, and carries the date it was verified.
• Anything older than 48 hours stops displaying. The button falls back to 'Check price on Amazon' rather than showing a number we cannot stand behind.
• Prices change constantly and we have no control over them. The price you see on Amazon is the price, and it may differ from what was shown here if it moved since the last refresh.
• Our cost-per-unit arithmetic - cost per filing inch, cost per square foot - is computed against the price at the time of writing and labeled as such. The buy button always carries the current price.

How the links work

Product links on this site go through our own redirect at `/go/` before reaching the retailer. Three reasons, all practical:

1. 01The affiliate tag is applied in one place, so it cannot drift from page to page.
2. 02A destination can be changed without rewriting content. If a product moves or a better retailer becomes available, that is a configuration change rather than an edit to twenty pages.
3. 03It is where we count outbound clicks, which is the only per-page performance signal available to us. We do not track you anywhere else and the redirect sets no cookie of its own.

The redirect is `noindex`, excluded from the sitemap and disallowed in robots.txt, because it is a mechanism rather than a page.

Programs we are in, and are not

We are in the Amazon Associates program and nothing else. No CJ campaigns, no Awin programs, no direct brand arrangements, no sponsorships.

Where a product is genuinely not sold on Amazon - which happens most in the office pod category, where the best-known brands are direct-sale only - we say so plainly and link to the manufacturer anyway, earning nothing. That is the right advice regardless of what it pays, and our pod pages carry it at the top rather than in a footnote.

If that ever changes, this page changes with it before any content does.

What we do not do

The publisher

Felt & File is published by Slate Mill Group, which operates it as part of a portfolio of independent review sites. Each site's recommendations are its own.

Questions

If anything on this page is unclear, or if you think a recommendation here looks commercially motivated, tell us. That is a fair question to ask of any site funded this way, and we would rather answer it than have you wonder.