Affiliate Disclosure
How Kitchen Finds Under $30 earns money — stated plainly.
Last updated: May 23, 2026
We believe you should know exactly how this site makes money, because that transparency is part of trusting our recommendations. Here it is, in plain terms.
Affiliate links
Kitchen Finds Under $30 contains affiliate links. When you click one of these links and make a purchase, we may earn a small commission — at no additional cost to you. The price you pay is exactly the same whether you use our link or not.
Amazon Associates
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Kitchen Finds Under $30 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.
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In addition to affiliate links, we display advertising through Google AdSense. This helps cover the cost of researching, writing, and hosting the site. Advertising revenue does not influence which products we recommend.
How this affects our recommendations: it doesn’t
This is the part that matters most. Our recommendations are made independently of any commission. Specifically:
- We do not rank products by commission. What goes on a list, and in what order, is decided by our research and our $30 standard — never by what pays us more.
- We recommend products first, then add links. The recommendation comes from the research. The affiliate link is added afterward, to a product we already chose.
- We are not paid for placement. We do not accept payment, free product, or any incentive in exchange for a recommendation, ranking, or review.
Why we disclose this
Disclosing affiliate relationships is required by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and it is also simply the honest thing to do. We would tell you anyway. If you ever feel a recommendation seems driven by anything other than genuine merit, we want to hear about it.
Questions
If anything about how we earn money is unclear, ask us:
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Michael Haralson worked in professional kitchens from 1979 to 1992: San Diego restaurants, six years with a catering company beside an Austrian chef, and two summers as a cook on the Finland to Sweden cruise route. He then built a fifteen-year career at Nokia. It began in product marketing and product management, where technical specifications and supplier evaluation were part of the work, and grew from a few countries to a region to global roles, then into sales and corporate strategy. That took him to Beijing for three years, where he spent many weekends in a different province trying the local food and took cooking classes. He has eaten in more than 40 countries and has been shown the kitchens of restaurants in Southern Europe. At home in Finland he cooks Cantonese, Sichuan and Mediterranean food, and still uses the cast iron skillet he bought in 1992. He is the author of Buy It Once, Book One of The Researched Kitchen, and writes here about the balance between kitchen tools that cost too much and those that fail too soon.