Affiliate Disclosure

The current position

ProjectCalc has no affiliate links, no price-comparison links and no commercial partners. Nothing on this site earns us a commission today.

Some calculator pages show a block headed “Check current prices” listing merchant names. Those names are inactive placeholders — they are plain text, not links, and each one is visibly marked with a TODO chip. They exist to show where price-checking will sit on the page once there is something real to put there. Clicking is not possible because there is nothing to click.

We have not joined any affiliate programme and we have not been paid, given products or given anything else of value by any merchant, manufacturer or trade body. No URL is invented anywhere on this site, and nothing goes live until there is a genuine account behind it.

What will change if links go live

A materials site is more useful if you can jump from “you need 34 bags of sand” to somewhere that sells them. If that becomes possible, some outbound links on this site may become affiliate links. If you click one and then buy something, the retailer may pay us a small commission. That is the whole arrangement, and three things about it matter:

The commission is paid by the retailer, not by you. It is a slice of the retailer's margin on a sale it would otherwise not have had. It does not add anything to the price you pay, and you are not charged more for arriving via this site.
You are under no obligation. An affiliate link is just a link. The calculators work exactly the same whether you click one, ignore it, or go straight to a supplier of your own choosing. We never require you to buy through us, and there is nothing to sign up for.
Affiliate links never change a calculation or a result. This is the part that would matter most if it were ever got wrong, so it is a hard rule: the numbers come from the physical quantities and UK trade allowances described on the about page, not from any partner's catalogue. We do not round up to suit a sponsor, we do not nudge quantities towards a paid-for merchant, and we do not hide the cheaper route when the arithmetic favours it. If the sums say the bagged route is cheaper than ready-mix, or that you need one tin fewer, that is what the page will show.

How an affiliate link would be marked

So that a paid link can never be mistaken for an ordinary one, any tracked link on this site would:

be clearly identified in the page text as a link that may earn us a commission, in language you can actually read rather than a footnote;
carry rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", the correct markup for a commercial link, so it is disclosed to search engines and does not pass ranking signals;
open in a new tab with target="_blank", so you never lose the calculator you were using;
sit in the clearly labelled price-checking block, never inside a result, a shopping list or a headline figure. The calculation area of every page stays completely free of commercial links.

The same rules would apply to any price-comparison arrangement: it would be disclosed in the same way, on the page where it appears, not buried here.

Merchant names in the placeholder blocks

Where a placeholder block lists merchant names, those names identify well-known UK retailers as places you might reasonably check prices. They are there because they are the obvious shops for that material, not because we were paid to include them, and no sponsor decides which names appear or in what order. If paid placement is ever introduced, it will be labelled as such at the point of use — an undisclosed paid ranking is exactly the sort of thing this page exists to rule out.

Independence

Commission, if it ever exists, is not allowed to influence the editorial or mathematical content of this site. A calculator's results are fixed by physics, industry-standard allowances and your own measurements. Nothing else gets a vote. The about page sets out where each figure comes from, and the privacy policy explains what a third-party retailer would and would not receive if you clicked through to one.

Questions

If you are unsure whether something on this site is a commercial link, it is not — unless it is explicitly labelled as one at the point where it appears. If you would like that clarified, the contact page tells you how to reach us.