How the money works

Some of the shop links in your advice are affiliate links. If you click one and end up buying, that retailer pays us a small commission — typically a few percent. You pay exactly the same price either way; the commission comes out of the shop’s margin, not your pocket. Those commissions are Choosebike’s only revenue, and they are what keeps your advice free.

Honestly? We started from the opposite position — “no affiliate links, ever” was on this very site. Then we ran into a fact about data: the cleanest machine-readable source of what’s actually in stock, in your region, at today’s price, is the product feeds retailers publish — and those feeds are published through affiliate programs, commission links attached.

Exact models, live prices and stock are precisely the facts an AI is worst at recalling on its own. Wiring in retailer feeds makes the advice more precise and funds it in the same motion. We’d want the data even at a 0% commission; the commission is what makes it sustainable.

The picks are locked before any link is attached. The recommendation engine chooses bikes from your answers, your region and its research; whether a pick carries an affiliate link is decided afterwards, by a separate step that only looks up where the chosen bike is sold.

Concretely, that means: no brand or shop can pay for placement · commission rates are never an input to ranking · a bike with no affiliate link anywhere still gets recommended when it’s the right bike — you’ll simply get a plain link · and no manufacturer pays us anything, in money or in loaned test bikes.

An affiliate link is the same product page you’d reach yourself, plus an anonymous tracking parameter that tells the shop “this click came from Choosebike”. The shop never learns your name, your email, or anything you told the wizard. The full promise about your data is in the privacy policy: we never sell it, to anyone.

We partner with retail affiliate networks (the programs behind large European and US bike retailers) and with some manufacturers’ own programs. Partners are being onboarded now; as programs go live, the list is kept current here. Where we have no partner, links are plain links — the advice doesn’t wait for a commission to exist.