The rules
A person checks every alert against them by hand. They are short because they are the whole of what we ask: what you promise, when you send it and what you earn from it are yours.
You publish first, we check after
Nothing waits for us. Your page is live the second you send the form, people can sign up on it, and you can put the link in your channel. Then somebody here opens it and reads it, because every alert is checked, without exception. Until it passes, the page says so, it stays out of our catalogue, search engines are told to skip it, and you cannot send the alert out.
What is not allowed
- One alert, one product. An alert says “this happened” about a single thing. A category, a search page, a list of ten deals or a whole shop is not one thing: there is no single moment to announce, and nobody can hold you to what they signed up for.
- Products and services only. The link has to go to something somebody can buy. News, articles, blog posts, giveaways and anything else that is not for sale: no. This is not a general purpose shortener, and the people who sign up agreed to hear about an offer.
- The title has to be the thing itself. What you write as the name of the offer has to be what is really at the other end of the link, and your sentence has to be about that same thing. This is the one that costs: people sign up on the strength of that name.
- No abuse and no filler. No insults, no threats, no sexual content, and nothing that is plainly spam or text typed to fill a box. Whatever you write here is read by people who have not chosen to be sold to yet.
- The sentence has to announce a moment. What gets sent is the line you would write on the day it happens: “it is live”, “it just went down to 199”. A description of the product is not that. It gives nobody a reason to wait, because they can follow the link right now, and the name of the thing belongs in the title, which arrives right above your sentence anyway.
- No links inside the sentence. The alert already has a link: the one you paste in its own field, which we follow, review and check again right before sending. A second one written into your sentence goes through none of that, and by the day the alert goes out it could lead anywhere. Name the shop if it helps, but leave the address out.
There will be more, written here as the cases turn up. If what you want to publish is not covered by any of them, send it in and the review will tell you.
Some shops only take links from a page of your own
Amazon is one of them. Its affiliate terms only allow your tagged links to be shown on pages of your own, and only pay for clicks that start there, so a link straight to the shop would earn you nothing and put your account at risk. For those shops, give us the address of the post where you have already published the product with your affiliate link in it: a message in your Telegram or WhatsApp channel, an entry on your site or blog, whatever you already use. We check this the moment you paste the link and we tell you which shop it is. The list only grows when we have read a programme's terms and can point at the clause, so a shop that is not on it is one we have not read, not one we have approved.
That post gets opened weeks later, not today. Someone who signs up now lands on it the day the price moves, so a post saying what the thing is still holds, and one built around today's price does not. The moment is what your alert says; the post is what the thing is.
The same terms say your Site must not have price tracking or price alerts on it. Holdout is not your Site, and we track nothing: nothing of ours watches a shop, and an alert goes out because you press a button, not because a number moved. If you tell us a price when you create a link, we keep it as a snapshot of that moment and use it only to suggest what works in your own channel: it is private, never shown on any public page, never shared with anyone, never compared over time and never triggers anything. Even so, the clause is yours and not ours, so read it and decide: an affiliate has been asked to remove a link to a price history page before, and publishing your Holdout link next to your affiliate link has that same shape.
What happens if you break them
One thing decides it, and it is not how bad the alert was. It is whether anybody had signed up yet.
- Nobody had signed up. We tell you what is wrong, or you delete it yourself from your account. Nothing was promised to anybody, so nothing is lost.
- People had signed up. The alert is called off and every one of them is told it is not coming. That cannot be undone: they have been written to and their sign-up is closed.
- Again, or plainly on purpose. The account goes with it, and the alerts under it.
None of that is automatic and none of it is a filter you can probe: a person reads what you wrote and opens your link. Publishing here costs nothing and waits for nobody, which is exactly why it is not worth trying it on.