Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure
This page explains, in plain English, how The Lighter Footprint makes money — because a site built on telling you to buy less owes you total honesty about the times it suggests you buy something.
What affiliate links are
Some links on this site are affiliate links. That means if you click one and buy something, the retailer pays us a small commission — typically a few percent of the sale. It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the same as if you'd gone to the store directly.
We participate in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and eco-brand programs through networks like ShareASale, Impact, and CJ Affiliate. When an article contains affiliate links, you'll see a short notice near the top of the page saying so.
Our affiliate policy (the part that matters)
This niche is built on buying less, so every affiliate link here follows three rules:
- Swap-focused, never haul-focused. We link to the single durable item that replaces a recurring purchase — never a pile of stuff to buy for its own sake.
- The math comes first. Every recommended product carries a payback period or cost comparison. If we can't show the numbers, we don't link it.
- We say when the answer is "buy nothing." Our articles regularly conclude that the cheapest option is DIY, something you already own, or simply not buying the thing. No commission is worth the trust we'd lose pretending otherwise.
We only recommend products we would buy ourselves, and our reviews include a "don't buy this" section whenever we find duds. Affiliate relationships never determine our verdicts.
Display advertising
This site may display ads served through an ad network (currently set up for Mediavine Journey). These ads are how the site earns revenue from readers who never click a product link. We don't control which specific ads appear, but we choose networks with standards against deceptive or predatory advertising, and we keep ad placements from interfering with reading.
Sponsored content
If we ever publish a sponsored post or accept a sponsored newsletter placement, it will be clearly labeled as sponsored at the top of the content — and we'll only accept sponsorships for products we'd recommend unpaid.
Digital products
We sell our own low-cost guides (such as a low-waste starter guide and a DIY recipes ebook). These are our own products, priced to be genuinely useful rather than premium courses — if a guide doesn't save you visible money or time, we don't want your money for it.
Questions?
If you have questions about how we make money, or you spot something on the site that feels like it conflicts with this policy, we want to hear about it. Contact us at hello@thelighterfootprint.com and a human will reply.
Last updated: September 10, 2026.