Affiliate Disclosure

TelescopeSetup.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.

What that means in practice

If you click a product link on this site and buy something, we receive a small commission from the retailer. It costs you nothing extra, and the price you pay is exactly the same as it would be if you had gone to the retailer directly.

The obvious conflict, and what we do about it

A commission is a percentage, so a site funded this way has an obvious incentive to recommend expensive things. Saying we resist that would be worth nothing, so instead it is handled structurally, and you can check each of these for yourself:

• Every roundup presents three tiers, beginner, intermediate and expert, rather than one flat list. Most readers are pointed at the middle.
• Every expert tier states who should not buy it. The expert build opens with five situations in which you should buy something cheaper instead.
• Several pages argue for spending less. The binoculars roundup argues you may not need a telescope at all, and the telescope size calculator spends half its length explaining why a smaller telescope you actually carry outside beats a larger one you do not.
• No commission rate influences which products appear. We do not rank by payout and we do not accept payment for placement or for a review.

Products with no affiliate link

A large share of serious telescope equipment sells through specialist dealers such as High Point Scientific, Agena and OPT rather than through Amazon. Those products still appear here when they are the right recommendation, and they link to a scoped Amazon search rather than to a fabricated product page. A search link is honest about what it is. We never invent a product identifier to make a card look complete, because a wrong link sends you to the wrong product and earns nothing anyway.

Prices

Prices shown were accurate when the page was compiled and change frequently, sometimes weekly. Always confirm at the retailer before you order. The running totals in the complete builds deliberately exclude any line whose price we could not state cleanly, rather than guessing at a figure and inflating the total.

We do not test equipment in person

Recommendations here are built from published manufacturer specifications, optical figures that can be verified by calculation, and reports from owners who have used the equipment under real skies. We do not bench test units and we never say we did. This is stated on every article page as well as here.

Questions

If anything about how this site is funded is unclear, ask through the contact page.