How we work

Runlow recommends household products people buy over and over. That includes detergent, cleaning supplies, paper goods, pet food, filters, personal care, diapers, and vitamins. We research every product we cover. We do not run a lab, and we have not tested most of what we write about.

What we do

We read the ingredient disclosures manufacturers are required to publish, including the ones mandated by California's Cleaning Product Right to Know Act, and explain what each ingredient actually does. A "protease" is an enzyme that breaks down protein stains like blood and grass; we say that instead of calling something "powerful cleaning enzymes."

We map products to the situations people actually buy for: hard water, septic systems, sensitive skin, pets and babies in the house, HE washing machines, cold washes. Compatibility fields on every product page report what the manufacturer states, not a verdict we've formed ourselves.

We build calculators that answer the question underneath most of these purchases: how much do you need, and how often will you run out. They run in your browser, use no server calls, and collect nothing.

How a fact gets on a page

Every product fact on Runlow lives in a structured record before it reaches a page. A product's ingredients, its certifications, what the manufacturer says it's compatible with, and its guidance for households with pets or babies are each stored as their own block. Each block carries the URL we read it from and the date we read it. Both of those render on the page, underneath the facts they belong to.

That structure is what makes the rest of this checkable. Nobody writing here can state an ingredient or a certification in a sentence, because prose on Runlow doesn't carry product facts at all. Those facts render from components that read the record directly. If the record doesn't hold the fact, the page has no way to show it.

So a gap shows up as a gap. Where we haven't confirmed a product's ingredient list, the page says we haven't confirmed it. Where we checked and the product holds no certifications, the page says that instead. Those are two different statements and the site keeps them apart.

Where the facts come from

Three kinds of source, and nothing else. A manufacturer's own product page is the primary source for what a product contains and what it works with. A certifying body's own public directory is what every certification claim gets checked against. Government publications are where we go for what a regulation states or what a certification program actually requires. Our sources covers each of the three in detail, andIngredient disclosure by brand shows what that rule turns up across every product we have researched so far.

A product claiming EPA Safer Choice or Leaping Bunny certification has to appear in that program's own directory before we report it as certified. Where a directory can't be searched by exact product, we record the manufacturer's claim and label it a claim.

Two widely used ingredient databases are missing from that list on purpose. SmartLabel and the Consumer Product Information Database both host disclosures manufacturers are legally required to publish, and both prohibit reproducing what they hold. A mandated disclosure doesn't make the platform hosting it free to reuse. So when a manufacturer's own site offers nothing but a link to one of those, we record that product's formulation as unknown. The gap itself is worth reporting, and we report it.

What we don't do

We don't claim to have tested a product unless we bought it ourselves and used it in a household, and a post says so explicitly when that's true. Everywhere else, the most we claim is that we researched, compared, or analyzed a product; not that we tried it, used it, or lived with it.

We don't operate a lab or employ scientists, and nothing on this site implies otherwise.

We don't aggregate buyer reviews. Major retailers' terms prohibit scraping review content, and we don't. You won't find star ratings, review counts, or review text sourced by automation anywhere on Runlow.

We don't make safety claims beyond what a cited source supports. If a certification body or a regulator states something about a product, we report what they state. We don't call a product "safe" or "toxic" in our own voice.

How we make money

Some of the retailer links on Runlow are affiliate links. When you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no added cost to you. Where we have an affiliate relationship with a retailer, the disclosure above every post's headline says so, and Amazon's required Associates statement appears in the footer of every page.

Not every retailer link is an affiliate link. Where we don't have an affiliate relationship yet, the link is plain, untagged, and works exactly the same way.

Editorial independence

Commission rates never factor into what we recommend. Picks are chosen on formulation, certification, compatibility, and fit for the situation you're buying for, not on which retailer or brand pays the highest commission. We'd rather point you to the right product at a retailer with no affiliate relationship than the wrong product at one that pays.

Who publishes Runlow

Runlow is published by STUD, the home reordering system that lets you reorder your exact household products in seconds. Our research and recommendations are independent of what STUD sells. A product doesn't get a better writeup for being easier to reorder through STUD.