Disclosure
How this site is funded
Some links to retailers on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through one, this site earns a small commission and you pay exactly the same price. Every one of those links is marked paid link where it appears.
That is the whole arrangement. There are no advertisements, no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, no brand has been given a say in what appears here, and no manufacturer has been sent a questionnaire asking how they would like to be described.
What the money is not allowed to touch
Every affiliate-funded gear site has the same failure mode: the recommendation drifts upward, because a €900 telescope pays roughly three times what a €300 telescope pays. It rarely happens as a decision. It happens as a hundred small edits, each defensible on its own.
The defence here is an ordering, and it is structural rather than editorial:
- The advisor computes your spending ceiling from your answers alone, before the catalogue is opened. It cannot see a price, a retailer or a commission at that point, because none of them have been loaded yet.
- It then ranks instrument classes— “150 mm Dobsonian”, “80 mm ED refractor” — which carry no links and earn nothing.
- Only once a recommendation exists does any page look up actual products and the offers attached to them. By then the answer is already fixed.
This is not a promise about our intentions. It is enforced by a test — lib/advisor/firewall.test.ts — which reads the source of every module in the reasoning layer and fails the build if any of them so much as mentions a retailer, an offer, a commission or the database. Making the advisor aware of the money would require deleting that test first, in a commit, with a name on it.
The recommendation is allowed to cost you nothing
Two of the outcomes this advisor can reach earn it precisely zero: “a pair of binoculars you may already own” and “nothing yet — learn the sky first, then decide”. They are first-class answers, reachable from the questionnaire, and they are tested. A recommender that cannot tell you to spend less is not a recommender.
Every result also carries a decline list — what not to buy yet, and what to buy instead. That list costs revenue by construction, which is the point of keeping it.
Who pays us
Nobody, currently. No affiliate arrangement is live, so every retailer link on this site is a plain link that earns nothing.
Who does not
These retailers are linked because they are the right place to buy the thing, and there is no arrangement with any of them.
- Amazon.fr — FR
- Astroshop — DE, FR, EU
- First Light Optics — GB
- Optique Unterlinden — FR
- Pierro Astro — FR
- Teleskop-Express — DE, EU
Prices
Every price on this site carries the date it was observed, and prices drift. They are there to tell you roughly what a class of instrument costs, not to be a live quote — check the retailer before you buy. A price with no date is never displayed anywhere on this site.
If you would rather not
Buy from your local astronomy shop instead. They will let you look through the thing before you spend the money, which is worth more than anything on this page, and second-hand instruments from a local astronomy club are frequently the best value available anywhere. Neither earns this site a penny and both are often the better advice.