About Creator Gear
We would rather be useful than first.
Creator Gear exists because researching equipment has become exhausting. Search results are crowded with pages that rank products nobody has looked at, in an order decided by commission rates. We are building the opposite of that: a small number of guides, written carefully, that treat you as someone capable of making your own decision once you have the right information.
Online only · United Kingdom
Independent publication
hello@creatorgearinsider.com
Independent reviews. Smart choices.
Creator Gear is an independent online publication covering the equipment creators use: cameras, drones, action cameras, audio, lighting, accessories and the software that ties it all together. We are not a shop, a manufacturer or a brand’s marketing arm. We have nothing to sell you directly.
What we do have is a point of view about how buying advice should work. Most equipment decisions are not really about products — they are about trade-offs. Sensor size against portability. Lens ecosystem against upfront cost. Ruggedness against image quality. A ranked list of ten products cannot help you until you understand which trade-off you are willing to make, which is why almost every guide we publish spends its first half on the decision and its second half on the equipment.
We write for people at every stage — someone buying their first proper camera, and someone who has been shooting for a decade and is weighing up a system change. The tone does not change between them. We explain jargon the first time it appears, we do not pad, and we assume you would rather read three hundred honest words than three thousand padded ones.
“If a recommendation only makes sense commercially, it does not get published.”
The single rule every Creator Gear guide is checked against.
Creator Gear covers eight core equipment categories, from first camera to full production kit.
Brand values
The five things every guide is measured against before it goes live.
What most gear sites do, and what we do instead
This is not a criticism of everyone publishing affiliate content — plenty do it well. But there is a familiar pattern to the pages that clog search results, and it is worth naming.
The familiar pattern
Ten products, ranked by commission
A ranking presented as objective, with no explanation of how the order was decided.
Specification tables copied from press releases, quietly out of date within months.
Implied hands-on testing, with no evidence any of it happened.
Two thousand words of preamble before the answer, because length is assumed to help rankings.
Urgency language applied to products whose prices move weekly.
How Creator Gear works
The decision first, the product second
We explain the trade-off you are choosing between before we name a single product.
We do not publish prices or specifications we cannot verify. We point you to the current listing instead.
We never claim first-hand testing we have not done. Where advice comes from documentation, we say so.
Guides are as long as the subject needs and no longer. We cut, then cut again.
No artificial urgency. If waiting three months is the right call, we will tell you to wait.
Editorial standards
Six principles every guide is held to
These are not marketing lines. They are the checklist a piece has to pass before it goes live, and the grounds on which you are entitled to complain if it does not.
Independent
No brand has ever paid for coverage, placement or a better position in a ranking. There is no rate card, because there is nothing for sale.
Honest
Including about our own limits. If we have not used something, we say so. If a claim cannot be verified, it is labelled as unverified rather than smoothed over.
Practical
Advice you can act on this week, with the equipment and budget you actually have, not advice that assumes an unlimited kit list.
Well researched
Manufacturer documentation, published specifications and official regulatory guidance come first. Marketing copy is treated as a claim to be checked.
Easy to understand
Written in plain British English. Every technical term is explained where it first appears, and nothing is left as an acronym you are expected to already know.
Written for humans
Not for search engines. If a sentence exists only to repeat a keyword, it gets deleted, even when that costs us traffic.
On this page
Full disclosure
Our complete affiliate policy, including how commission is handled editorially.
How Creator Gear makes money
Creator Gear earns affiliate commission. When you follow certain links on this site and go on to buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your pocket.
That model is common, and on its own it says nothing about whether a site can be trusted. What matters is the wall between the commercial side and the editorial side. Ours works like this: recommendations are decided before anyone looks at whether a commission exists. Plenty of the equipment we suggest earns us nothing at all — some retailers we recommend have no affiliate programme, and we recommend them anyway when they are the right answer.
We do not run display advertising, we do not sell sponsored posts, and we do not accept payment for placement or for a more favourable write-up. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed at the top of the affected page in plain language, not buried in a footer.
The short version
Affiliate income is a consequence of writing something useful, not the reason for writing it. If those two things ever pull in opposite directions, the reader wins and we take the loss.
How we research a guide
Every guide follows the same five stages. It is slower than the alternative, which is why we publish less than most sites in this space.
01
Establish the reader’s real question
“Which drone should I buy?” is almost never the actual question. Usually it is “what am I allowed to fly, and what will it let me film?” We work out the underlying decision first, because a guide that answers the wrong question is useless no matter how well written.
02
Go to primary sources
Manufacturer documentation, published specification sheets, official regulatory guidance from bodies such as the Civil Aviation Authority. Aggregated roundups and marketing copy are read, but treated as claims to be checked rather than facts to be repeated.
03
Mark the boundaries of what we know
Anything that cannot be verified is either omitted or explicitly flagged as unverified. We do not estimate figures to make a table look complete, and we never describe equipment as though we have used it when we have not.
04
Write for two readers at once
A beginner should be able to follow the whole piece without looking anything up. An experienced creator should not find a single sentence that makes them wince. Anything that fails either test is rewritten.
05
Revisit rather than repost
When something material changes — a regulation, a product category, a piece of advice that no longer holds — we update the guide and say what changed. We do not refresh the date to game a ranking.
Three readers, one standard
Just starting
You have decided to take it seriously
You are moving beyond a phone and the choice feels overwhelming. You need someone to tell you which decisions matter and which are noise, and to be honest about when your phone plus a decent microphone is genuinely enough for now.
Building out
You have a camera and now need everything else
Audio, lighting, stabilisation, storage, power. This is where budgets quietly disappear into things that do not improve the work. We put the accessory categories in priority order so the money goes where it changes the result.
Experienced
You are weighing up a system change
You know what you are doing and you do not need the basics explained. What you want is a clear-eyed account of what a switch actually costs — lenses, workflow, muscle memory — before you commit to it.
What we cover
Drones, cameras, action cameras, audio equipment, creator accessories, lighting, camera gear, editing software, buying guides, product reviews, product comparisons, tutorials, problem-solving articles, brand guides and industry news where it genuinely affects a buying decision.
What we do not cover
Rumours, leaks and unconfirmed release schedules. Deal-of-the-day posts. Anything that requires us to speculate about a product nobody outside the manufacturer has seen. Those things generate traffic; they do not help you choose.
Hold us to this
If a guide falls short of the standards on this page, we want to hear about it. Corrections are published, not quietly buried.