Affiliate Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

That disclosure appears on every page of this site, and it is worth explaining properly.

What this means

An affiliate link tells a retailer that you arrived from The Hobby Closet. If you go on to buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise.

How it affects our recommendations

It does not.

We recommend the cheapest thing that genuinely works for a beginner, which frequently means recommending something inexpensive — or telling you to rent, borrow, or buy secondhand, none of which earn us anything. Several guides on this site explicitly advise against buying gear at all until you know you will stick with the hobby.

We do not accept payment for a recommendation, and we do not rank products by commission rate.

Programmes we participate in

[LIST THE AFFILIATE PROGRAMMES YOU HAVE ACTUALLY JOINED. Amazon in particular requires specific wording — the current required phrasing is available in your Associates account. Do not list a programme until you have been approved for it.]

Independence

The recommendations here reflect what we believe is genuinely useful to a beginner. If a product is widely recommended elsewhere and we think it is a poor first purchase, we will say so, regardless of whether we could earn from it.

If you would rather not use our links, simply search for the product directly. It costs you nothing either way, and the guides are free to read regardless.

Questions

Happy to answer anything about how this works: [YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS]