Editorial policy

Independence from commercial relationships

Frost & Fender earns affiliate commission on qualifying purchases. That is the entire business model and we are not going to be coy about it: we have a commercial interest in you buying something.

Here is what that interest is not allowed to touch.

• Rankings are never sold. No manufacturer has paid for a position on this site, and none has been offered one. If that ever changes, this page changes first and every affected page is labeled.
• We accept no free products. Not samples, not review units, nothing. It is one of the reasons we cannot claim to have tested anything, and we would rather have that limitation than the obligation.
• Commission rate never influences the order. Products are ranked for the buyer this site is written for — someone weighing a cheap prevention against an expensive problem — and our top pick is frequently among the cheapest options on the page, which is the opposite of what commission-driven ranking would produce.
• No sponsored posts. Every page here is written because we thought it was worth writing.

The counterweight, in practice

Stating independence is easy. What actually demonstrates it is publishing things that cost us money, and we do that deliberately:

• Every roundup names something to skip. A specific product or a whole sub-category that is not worth buying, with the reason.
• Several pages argue for buying nothing. Our tire chains guide opens by telling most readers they do not need chains. Our car cover page tells daily drivers not to buy one. Our garage heater roundup opens by saying to buy a $30 seal first.
• We tell you when the free option is better. The single highest-value action in our road salt guide is a two-dollar underbody wash, which earns us nothing.

What we will never publish

• A testing claim. No “in our testing”, no “we found”, no “after a month of use” about a product we have not handled. We have not tested this gear.
• A fabricated review or testimonial. There are none on this site and there never will be. We have no customers to quote.
• A credential we do not hold. No certifications, no “expert panel”, no “mechanic recommended” without a named mechanic.
• Review or rating structured data. Our editorial scores are visible on the page and never appear in the machine-readable markup, because marking up an editorial judgment as a product rating would contradict what we say in our own copy.
• An invented specification or price. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, our tables say so. Where we hold no live price, the button says “check price”.
• Manufactured urgency. No countdown timers, no “only 3 left”, no fake scarcity of any kind.

Sourcing standards

Every factual or numeric claim carries a source, and nothing on this site comes from memory.

• Product specifications: the manufacturer’s own published page, spec sheet or manual, cited by name and linked in the spec table beside the figure.
• Prices: a live data feed with a 48-hour freshness limit. Past that, the number disappears.
• Arithmetic: the formula is shown, every input is stated, and rate figures are cited to a named public source with its date.
• Safety and regulatory claims: the manufacturer’s manual or the published rule, linked, with a plain statement of when a job needs a professional.
• Owner-reported failure patterns: always described as owner-reported, never as our own finding and never quantified as a rating.

Every page ends with a Sources section listing what was consulted. The full methodology is here.

Corrections

We make corrections in place, with a dated note, and we never edit silently to hide an error.

If you find one — a misread specification, a sum that does not work, a discontinued product still being recommended — tell us. You will get a reply, and the page will carry a note saying what changed and when. That is the policy rather than a courtesy.

Update cadence

• Prices: refreshed daily and automatically. A price older than 48 hours is not displayed.
• Roundups: re-checked in full every August and September, ahead of the season, for availability and pick changes.
• Calculators: reviewed annually and whenever the cited electricity rate source updates.
• Safety and regulatory guides: annually, plus immediately on any known rule change.
• Trust pages: annually, plus immediately on any change to how we operate.

The visible “last updated” date changes only when the content changed. An automated price refresh is not an edit and does not bump it. A date that moves every day tells a reader nothing, and we would rather the date meant something.

Affiliate link handling

Every outbound commercial link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", opens in a new tab, and routes through our own redirect so the destination can be changed without rewriting content. The disclosure appears above the first affiliate link on every monetized page, not only in the footer, because the FTC requirement is that it is encountered before the link.

The full affiliate disclosure is here.