FilterOut asks readers to weigh who is paying for the advice they read. That test applies here too. This page sets out how the site is funded, where its data comes from, how scores and rankings are decided, and what happens when we get something wrong. It is the document to hold us to.
FilterOut is a self-funded personal project. It carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content. No supplier has ever paid to appear on the site, to improve a score, to have a score removed, or to influence where they sit in a ranking. There is no mechanism by which they could.
Every outbound link to a supplier is a plain link. Nothing on this site is tracked, tagged or routed for commission, and we earn nothing if you buy anything from anyone we review.
If FilterOut ever takes advertising, affiliate income or any other commercial arrangement, it will be disclosed on this page and on every page it affects, before it takes effect — not after.
Figures on this site come from named, checkable sources: utility annual water quality reports, certification registers such as the ABCB WaterMark database and the NSF listings, published product specifications, peer-reviewed and agency-funded research, and public customer reviews. Where a figure came from a supplier rather than an independent source, the page says so.
No figure on this site is estimated, rounded from memory, or carried over from another publisher's compilation and presented as our own. If we cannot trace it, it does not go up.
Water quality data is labelled by how well we can stand behind it:
Where our own interpretation sits on top of published data — for example, our characterisation of which source supplies a given Perth zone — the page carries a note saying so, because it is our reading rather than the utility's.
Suppliers are scored against ten published criteria, set out in full on the methodology page. Scores are reviewed quarterly.
Technology reviews are a separate category and work differently: they assess a treatment technology against published research, not a particular brand's implementation of it. No product is scored in a technology review.
We get things wrong. When we do, the correction goes on the page, and the page states that it was updated and when.
Suppliers are welcome to contact us, and many have. What they can and cannot get is fixed:
Where a page is critical of a supplier, that criticism is sourced to something checkable — a certification scope, a published price, a documented pattern in public reviews — and not to anonymous complaint.
Stating the limits matters as much as stating the standards.
FilterOut does not carry a bylined author, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight.
The reasoning is that this site is built to be audited on its inputs, not accepted on its author's authority. Every score traces to ten published criteria. Every water quality figure traces to a named utility report and year. Every research claim traces to a study you can look up. If those inputs are sound, the conclusions hold regardless of who assembled them — and if they are not, no author's credentials should persuade you otherwise. A name at the top of the page invites you to trust the person instead of checking the work, which is the opposite of what this site is for.
There is a practical reason too. FilterOut publishes critical assessments of businesses that are, in some cases, substantial and well-resourced. A site with no individual to pressure is harder to lean on.
We accept the trade-off this creates. Anonymity is a fair thing for a reader to be sceptical about, and the honest answer to that scepticism is not "trust us" — it is that everything here is designed to be checked without needing to.
If a figure looks wrong, a score looks unjustified, or a page reads as though something is being sold to you, tell us: info@filterout.com.au. Corrections that hold up are made and dated. Corrections that don't, we will explain why.
These standards apply to every page on FilterOut, including this one. They sit alongside our scoring methodology, our guide to vested interests in filter advice, and our terms and privacy pages. Last reviewed August 2026.