Disclosure

Affiliate disclosure

How does StreamPartPicker make money?

StreamPartPicker is free and is funded by affiliate commission. When you buy through a link here, the retailer or service pays us a percentage of the sale and you pay exactly what you would have paid anyway. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, and we participate in eBay Partner Network and several software and service referral programs. Nobody pays for a recommendation, a ranking position, or a review score.

What an affiliate link is

A buy link on this site carries a tag identifying us as the referrer. If you buy within the retailer's tracking window, they pay us a commission out of their own margin. Your price does not change, your consumer rights do not change, and the retailer handles the order, the returns, and the warranty exactly as if you had arrived any other way. Affiliate links here are marked as sponsored links in the page code, which is what search engines expect.

Programs we participate in

Amazon Associates. Most hardware links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
eBay Partner Network. Used and discontinued gear, which matters here because a lot of the best IRL equipment has no current retail listing at all.
Software and service referrals. Streaming services, bonding services, mobile data providers, and hosting. Some pay a one-off commission, some pay recurring, and some only offer account credit.

Where a category has both a paying partner and a free or cheaper option that is genuinely better, both are listed and the better one is the recommendation. OBS, Moblin, IRL Pro, Larix, and belaBOX pay nothing and are recommended constantly.

About the prices on this site

Prices here are a snapshot, not a live feed. They come from our own price bake, which records what a retailer listed on the day it ran, and every price is shown with the date it was last checked. Prices and availability change constantly and ours will be out of date to some degree at all times. The price on the retailer's page when you check out is the price that applies.

Where a part has no tracked price we fall back to a planning estimate from our own catalog, labelled as an estimate. Those exist so a build can be totalled, and they are not a claim about what anyone is charging today. Averages and price history shown on the site, including the "below average" figures on the deals page, are computed by us from those tracked points. They are not manufacturer list prices and no retailer ever charged them.

The lines this does not cross

No brand pays to be recommended, ranked higher, or included in a build.
No brand pays to have a criticism removed or a competitor left out.
No brand reviews a guide before it publishes.
Rankings are computed from rating, review volume, and price. Commission rate is not an input to any ordering on this site.
If a paid placement ever appears, it will be labelled as one on the page, not disclosed only here.

Why this matters for what you read

An affiliate site has an obvious incentive to tell you to buy more. The counterweight built into this one is that the quality engine frequently says the expensive thing will not help: a better camera cannot beat a platform bitrate cap, a second SIM is not more bandwidth, and a large share of what people want to buy is not their actual bottleneck. Those verdicts cost us commission and they are the reason to trust the rest.

Questions

Email builds@streampartpicker.com. See also the editorial policy and methodology.