- Some links are affiliate links. Buy through one and we may earn a commission.
- You never pay more. The price is identical whether you use our link or go direct.
- Commission can't change a number. A saponification value is a fact about an oil; no retailer can move it.
- Nothing here is paid placement. No sponsored posts, no money for a spot on a list.
How affiliate links work
When you click an affiliate link, you go to the retailer's own site as normal. Their system records that the visit came from us, usually with a cookie, and if you buy something within their attribution window they pay us a small percentage. The price you pay is exactly the same — the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.
We never see your name, your order, your payment details, or what you bought. At most we see an anonymous count of sales attributed to the site. Our privacy policy covers the data side in full.
Which programs we're in
Right now, none — and there are no affiliate links on this site at all. SoapmakingToolbox is new, we haven't applied to any program yet, and nothing here currently earns us a penny. We are publishing this page before there is money involved rather than after, because the standards below are easier to state honestly now than to retrofit later.
The moment we join a program it will be named here, along with any disclosure wording that program's terms require, and the notice in the site footer will change to say so. This page is generated from the list of programs we're actually accepted into, so it cannot quietly fall out of date.
How we decide what to recommend
These are the actual rules, not aspirations:
- The math picks first. Recommendations follow from the same engine the calculators run. If the numbers favor something that pays us nothing, that's what we name.
- We say when cheap wins — and in soapmaking it usually does. Lard and beef tallow from the grocery store make excellent, hard, creamy bars for a fraction of what boutique butters cost. A $15 stick blender saponifies exactly as well as a $60 one. Most "exotic" oils are present in a recipe at 5% and contribute almost nothing you could feel. We publish that, because it's true.
- We'll send you somewhere that pays us less. For oils in bulk, dedicated soapmaking suppliers are usually cheaper per kilo than the general retailer that pays the better commission. Where that's the case, we say so.
- No paid placement, ever. Nobody can buy a mention, a ranking, a review or a link. No sponsored posts, no paid guest articles, no link exchanges.
- No pay-to-play rankings. Where we compare products, the order comes from specifications and suitability. Commission rates are not an input, and a higher-paying product does not get moved up.
- Gifted products get labeled. We don't currently accept free samples. If that changes, anything we were given will be marked as such on the page where it appears.
A soap site that recommends whatever pays best gets read once. One that tells you the $4 tub of lard outperforms the $30 butter, and that the only equipment genuinely worth spending on is a scale that reads to 0.1 g, gets bookmarked and gets its recipes checked here for years. That isn't altruism, it's the business model — and it's the same reason every saponification value on this site names its source.
What commission cannot touch
It's worth being precise, because this site's whole claim is that its numbers are checkable. No commercial relationship has any effect on the calculation engine. Saponification values come from published reference data with the source named on the page; the ranges we check them against come from the literature; the results are verified against reference recipes by an automated test suite before every deployment. There is no mechanism by which a supplier could pay to have an oil's SAP value nudged, appear higher in the oil picker, or be described as better-performing than its fatty acids say it is — and if there were, the "show the math" panel on every result would give it away.
Where you'll see affiliate links
When there are any, mainly two places: gear pages comparing specific equipment, and occasionally in a guide where naming a real product makes advice easier to act on. Any page carrying affiliate links says so near the top, and the footer of every page carries the standing notice.
Links to suppliers' safety data, IFRA certificates, standards bodies, regulators and reference sources are never affiliate links. Those are citations, and we'd link them regardless.
Prices and availability
Prices change, stock runs out, and manufacturers revise models without changing the name. Anything we quote was accurate when written, and the retailer's own page is the authority at the moment you buy. Ingredient prices you enter into the cost calculator are your own figures — we don't supply them, and they stay in your browser. If you find something out of date here, tell us and we'll fix it.
One thing this page isn't
A recommendation to buy anything. You can make excellent soap with a supermarket's own-brand oils, a stainless pot, a $15 stick blender, a cardboard box lined with parchment, and goggles. The gear pages exist for when you've decided you need something, not to talk you into needing it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation looks influenced by a commission, say so directly — the contact page or [email protected]. That's a complaint we take seriously, and one we'd much rather hear than not.