How Tread & Tone Makes Money
Plainly: if you buy something through a link on this site, we earn a commission from the retailer. It costs you nothing extra, and it never changes what we recommend.
The short version
Tread & Tone is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
When you click a “Check price on Amazon” button here and go on to buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid arriving from anywhere else. There is no markup, no surcharge, and no version of this where a link costs you money.
Which links earn us money
Every product link on this site routes through a /go/ address on our own domain before forwarding you to the retailer. That is how we keep the destinations in one place rather than scattered across fifty pages. Those links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", which is how we tell search engines they are paid — as required by Google’s link-spam policy.
Every earning link is also marked #ad at the point of the click, next to a link back to this page. You should never have to guess.
Our Amazon Associates tag is t5fitness-20. It is shared across several Type 5 Marketing fitness sites, which is normal — Amazon caps the number of tracking IDs an account can hold.
Links to the CDC, the National Institute on Aging, the Arthritis Foundation and to manufacturer specification pages earn us nothing. Those are citations. We link them because a claim without a source is not worth reading.
Retailers we do not have a relationship with
Some machines worth mentioning are not sold through any program we belong to — Sole Fitness, Life Fitness, Teeter, NuStep among them. Where we mention them, we earn nothing, and we will not pretend a machine is buyable when it is not. This site does not build a buy button that cannot exist.
We have not joined a network program for any of those brands. If that changes we will say so here, and the recommendation will not change because of it.
What commission does not do
It does not decide the order of a shortlist. We know that is what every affiliate site says, so here is the structural proof rather than the promise:
- The cheapest machine is the top pick on several of these pages. On the recumbent bike shortlist, the most expensive machine — which would earn the most — is ranked below a bike costing a fraction of it, because the cheaper one publishes a real seat height and the expensive one does not.
- There are currently 5 products on this site that we explicitly tell you not to buy, and they are left in the comparison tables rather than removed. They pay the same commission rate as everything else.
- The ranking criteria are published in full on the methodology page, before any product is ranked, so you can check whether we followed them.
No sponsored content, no free products
- We accept no payment from any manufacturer for a placement or a ranking.
- We accept no free products, samples or loan units.
- Nothing on this site is a paid post, and nothing here has been written for a brand.
- No manufacturer sees a page before it is published.
This is easier for us than it sounds, because we do not test equipment. There is nothing for a brand to send us.
About the prices you see
Prices come directly from Amazon’s product data, and each one is stamped with the date it was read. They are refreshed daily and they expire— after 48 hours a number disappears and the button falls back to “Check price on Amazon” rather than showing you something stale.
Right now 33 products on this site carry a live price, last verified July 24, 2026. No price is ever written into the text of a page, and none is stored in our product data — so a stale price is not something we have to remember to avoid, it is something the site cannot do.
Prices do change between our reading them and your clicking. The price on Amazon at checkout is the real one.
What we are not
We are not a retailer. We do not hold stock, take payment, ship anything, or handle returns or warranties. If something arrives damaged or you need to send it back, that is between you and the retailer you bought it from.
We are also not medical professionals, and nothing here is medical advice. See our editorial policy for how we handle health-related claims.
Questions
If anything about how this site is funded is unclear, ask: info@treadandtone.com. Tread & Tone is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC.