- Some links may be 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.
- Commissions don't pick the winner. Products are chosen on specs and math, and we say so when the gear you already own is enough.
- 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
We currently participate in the following programs:
- Amazon Associates: product links on the gear pages when they ship — no Amazon link is live on the site yet.
As an Amazon Associate, RVingToolbox earns from qualifying purchases.
How we decide what to recommend
The rules:
- The math picks first. A recommendation is a filter over product specifications, run against the numbers your rig produced. If the product that clears your number pays us nothing, that's the one we name.
- We say when what you own is enough. Plenty of the best answers in RVing are unprofitable: the $300 soft start that lets your existing generator run the air conditioner instead of a $1,200 new one; the propane furnace you already have instead of a battery bank big enough to run electric heat; the trip to the CAT scale that shows your hitch was fine all along. We publish those anyway, because they're correct, and a calculator that has nothing to sell you in that moment is the one you'll trust when it does.
- Smallest that fits, then one step up. When something does need buying, we show the smallest product that clears your number and one with headroom, never the biggest in the catalog. Oversizing is how affiliate sites make money, and it's how readers end up with a 3,000 W inverter their batteries can't feed.
- No paid placement, ever. Nobody can buy a mention, a ranking, a review, or a link. We don't accept sponsored posts, paid guest articles, or link exchanges.
- No pay-to-play rankings. Where we compare products, the order is set by specifications and suitability. Commission rates are not a factor, and a higher-paying product does not get moved up.
- We disclose gifted products. We don't currently accept free samples. If that ever changes, any product we were given will be labeled as such on the page where it appears.
An RV site that recommends whatever pays best gets read once. One that tells you your 2,200 W generator will run the air conditioner with a soft start, and shows the starting-current arithmetic behind it, gets bookmarked. A reader who trusts the numbers comes back before the next upgrade, and that repeat visit is worth more to the site than any single commission.
Where you'd see affiliate links
When they exist, mainly two places: gear pages, where we list equipment that fits the numbers your rig produced, and in a calculator result where naming a product makes the number easier to act on: "you need a 2,000 W pure-sine inverter" next to an actual 2,000 W inverter. Any page carrying affiliate links will say so directly above the first one, and the footer of every page on the site carries the same notice.
Links to manufacturer documentation, standards bodies, government regulations and community resources are never affiliate links. Those are references, and we'd cite them regardless.
Prices and availability
Prices change, stock runs out, and manufacturers revise models without changing the name. We don't print prices for that reason, only a rough price band, and the retailer's own page is always the authority at the moment you buy. 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. Most of what this site computes points the other way: how long the tanks you have will last, whether the truck you have can tow the trailer you're looking at, what the batteries you own will run. The gear pages, when they arrive, will exist for when a number has shown you need equipment, not to talk you into needing it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you ever think a recommendation looks influenced by a commission, say so directly: [email protected]. That's a complaint we take seriously, and one we'd rather hear than not.