How this site makes money

Amazon Associates

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Some pages carry links to Amazon listings under the associate tag carbs.com-20, and if you buy something after following one we may earn a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and the price you pay is the same as it would be without us.

Every such link is labelled as an affiliate link where it appears, not only on this page, and is marked rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" in the markup so a search engine is told exactly what a reader is told.

Listings show the title, brand, image and price Amazon holds, and each rail states the date those prices were retrieved. The current catalogue was retrieved on 4 September 2026. Prices move constantly, and the price shown on Amazon at the moment you buy is the one that applies. Images are loaded from Amazon's own servers, as its operating agreement requires.

How a link is chosen

By brand name, and only by brand name. The catalogue is built by asking Amazon for the brand already on the page, taken from the FDA listing, and keeping what Amazon returns in the order Amazon returned it. There is no hand-picked product, no preferred seller, and no ranking of our own.

What follows from that is worth being explicit about, because it is the whole compliance position of this site. We do not say a product is a good buy. We do not say it is the right product for a symptom, or for anybody. A listing appearing next to a product page is not a recommendation, an endorsement, or a judgement that this is the version to choose.

There is also a gate, and it is written as a whitelist rather than a list of exclusions. A link may only attach to a product FDA records as a human over-the-counter drug that is available at retail and is not on a controlled substance schedule. Prescription products, bulk ingredients and products supplied for further processing can never carry one. A rule written the other way round, as a list of things to exclude, would keep working until FDA listed something nobody had thought of. This one fails closed.

Where no listing resolves for a brand, the rail renders nothing. It is never filled with a near match or a generic substitute.

A product appears on this site because the FDA National Drug Code Directory lists it. Whether it can be bought on Amazon has no bearing on whether it gets a page, where that page sits in any list, or what the page says. Products with no plausible retail presence at all, including bulk ingredients supplied for further processing, have pages here on exactly the same terms.

Advertising

There is none. No display advertising, no sponsored placements, no native units, no newsletter sponsorships and no affiliate networks beyond the single Amazon relationship described above.

If that changes, any advertising will be contextual only: chosen to suit the page it appears on and never the person reading it. We will not run behavioural targeting on a site where the page someone is reading can reveal that they are trying to quit smoking or are being treated for oral thrush. Advertising will be labelled as advertising.

There are no advertising pixels on this site today and no third-party trackers. The reasoning is set out on the privacy page.

What we refuse

These are not oversights. Each is a category this site could earn from and does not.

• No per-referral payment from any pharmacy, telehealth service, clinical laboratory, clinic or durable medical equipment supplier. A site about drug products is offered this constantly. Smoking cessation programmes in particular are offered at good rates, and they are exactly the ones to decline.
• No payment for a favourable mention, and no payment for a place in any list. The ordering of every table on this site is determined by the FDA listing. There is no arrangement under which money could change it, and if one were offered it would be refused.
• No supplement affiliate revenue attached to a health claim. The temptation on a site covering zinc lozenges is obvious. Taking it would mean having a financial interest in the reader believing something the evidence does not clearly support.
• No sponsored content presented as editorial. Nothing on this site is written by or paid for by anyone with a product to sell, and nothing will be.
• No sale or sharing of reader data with data brokers, insurers or advertising platforms. What you read here is not a product.
• No lead generation of any kind. There is no form on this site. There is nothing to submit and nobody to pass it to.

Nicotine replacement, and where the line is

Nicotine lozenges and nicotine gum are the largest single category on this site, and they can carry an affiliate link. That deserves an explanation, because it looks at first glance like a site about medicine linking to nicotine.

A nicotine polacrilex lozenge is an FDA-approved over-the-counter drug whose approved indication is helping people stop smoking. Every non-bulk nicotine listing in this dataset is filed under an approved drug application, an ANDA or an NDA, which anyone can check on the product pages themselves. It is regulated as a drug, by FDA's drug centre, on the same footing as the cough drops beside it.

Nicotine pouches, vapes and e-liquids are a different legal universe. They are tobacco-derived nicotine products regulated by FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, subject to premarket tobacco product application requirements, state flavour restrictions and the reporting and delivery obligations of the Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act. None of them is a drug product, none of them appears in the FDA drug listing this site is built from, and none of them will ever be added to it.

• No nicotine pouches. Not in the data, not in a guide, and not behind an affiliate link.
• No vapes, no e-liquids, no devices. Same reason.
• No cigarettes, cigars or smokeless tobacco. Obviously.

The rule that keeps this true is not editorial discipline, it is structural. A product can only produce a purchase link on this site if FDA classifies it as a human over-the-counter drug, and the check is written as a whitelist rather than as a list of exclusions, so an unfamiliar product type produces no link at all. A tobacco product has no FDA drug product type, so it could not acquire one even if somebody added it to the dataset by mistake.

Why the line sits there

A drug reference that took money from anyone selling a drug would be worthless, and it would be worthless in a way that is hard to detect from the outside. The failure mode is not a bribe for a glowing review. It is subtler: a category that quietly grows, an ingredient described a little more warmly than the evidence supports, a table ordered by something other than the data.

The defence against that is structural rather than a matter of good intentions. Every list here is ordered by a rule stated on the methodology page: product count, strength, or the alphabet. Every page exists because a row exists in a federal register. There is no editorial slot to sell, because there is no editorial selection to make.

The one commercial link on the site is a search for a name the FDA listing already contains. It cannot influence which products appear, what they are said to contain, or how they are described, because none of those things are ours to decide. That is the point of building it this way.

The boundary between reporting a label and recommending a product is set out under about, and the contractual version is in the terms.