How this works, and who pays
Comparison sites have a reputation problem, and it is deserved. The usual arrangement is that the shops paying the highest commission appear at the top, the ones paying nothing do not appear at all, and nobody tells you which is which. This page is the standing commitment not to do that.
The rules
- Every stockist we know of gets listed, including the ones that pay us nothing. Right now, that is all 5 of them.
- The price table is sorted by price. Not by commission, not by partnership tier. Cheapest first, out of stock last.
- Recommendations are computed from your measurements, by the code in
lib/recommend.ts. No frame can be paid up the rankings, because there is nowhere in that function to put a bid. - Paid links are labelled. Only the paid ones. Marking every link as an advert when most of them earn nothing just teaches people to ignore the label.
Where the money actually comes from
Today: almost nowhere, and that is worth being straight about. Affiliate agreements with opticians need to be applied for, approved, and in several cases negotiated, and none of that happens for a site with no traffic. So the plan is deliberately staged.
Now: the shelf
Amazon Associates links on accessories, readers and books. Cases, cloths, repair kits and anti-fog are cheap, need no prescription, and are genuinely worth owning, so recommending them costs no credibility. It will not make anyone rich. It makes the site non-zero while the traffic builds, which is a different and more useful thing.
Next: the networks
A good number of eyewear retailers already run public affiliate programmes through networks like Awin, CJ and Rakuten. You do not need a relationship to join one; you apply. That turns a plain outbound link into a paid one without anybody having to take a meeting.
Then: direct agreements
Which is where the click log comes in. Every outbound click is recorded from the first day, whether or not the destination pays us anything, because “we sent you 4,000 qualified clicks last quarter, here is the breakdown by frame” is the only version of that conversation a retailer takes seriously. The data has to exist before the revenue does, or it never exists at all.
Why the frames are drawn, not photographed
Every frame on this site is generated from its measurements (lens width, bridge, temple length, lens depth, rim thickness) using the same geometry code for the catalogue thumbnail and the 3D try-on. Nothing here is scraped from a retailer’s asset library.
That is partly an ethical position and partly a practical one. A manufacturer’s 3D model is their work and their copyright, and lifting it would be both wrong and the fastest possible way to get a site shut down. Measurements are different: they are facts about a physical object, published by every retailer on every product page, and facts are not anybody’s property.
The practical part is that generated geometry scales. A photographed catalogue costs a photoshoot per frame per colourway. A generated one costs a row in a data file, renders at any size, and recolours instantly. What you lose is photorealism: these are honest shape-and-size previews, not renders you would mistake for a photograph, and the site should never pretend otherwise.
What this site is not
It is not an optician. It cannot test your eyes, it cannot dispense a prescription, and the fit advice here is the same rules of thumb a good dispensing optician would give you across a counter: useful, and no substitute for the counter. Get your eyes tested properly, and check the PD we measure against a second source before spending real money on a strong prescription.