Terms of Use, Answered as Questions

What are you agreeing to when you use this site?

By opening a page on espressotested.com, following a link out of one of our tables, or writing to us at the address at the foot of this page, you accept the terms set out here. They are short on purpose. If a single one of them does not sit right with you, the remedy is simple: close the tab. There is no account to cancel, no subscription to unwind and nothing of yours held on our side.

We revise this page when the site changes — a new comparison format, a different affiliate programme, a rewritten submission process. Revisions take effect on the date printed under the heading above, and the date changes whenever the substance does. We do not email anyone about edits and we do not keep a public archive of old wording, so if the exact terms matter to you for some reason, save a copy of the version you read. Carrying on with the site after a revision is how you accept it.

We also reserve the right to change the site itself: to retire a guide, restructure a ranking, drop a category, or take the whole thing offline for an afternoon without warning. Nothing here obliges us to keep any particular page, table or URL alive.

What is Espresso Tested, and what is it not?

Espresso Tested is an editorial site about home espresso machines. We read specifications, compare what machines claim against what owners report, weigh price against build, and publish an opinion. That opinion is exactly what it sounds like — a judgement, formed in good faith, that a reasonable person could disagree with. Two people who care equally about coffee will rank the same pair of machines differently, and neither of them is committing fraud. Read our About page for how we approach the work.

What we are not is a shop. This is worth stating plainly because the tables on this site look a little like a storefront, and they are not one:

• We sell nothing. No machine, grinder, portafilter or basket is ours to sell.
• We take no payment. There is no checkout here, no cart and no card form. If any page ever asks you for card details, it is not us, and we would be glad to hear about it.
• We ship nothing and hold no stock. We do not have a warehouse or a returns desk.
• We cannot service, repair, replace, refund or warrant a machine, and we cannot chase a retailer or a manufacturer on your behalf.

Every buying decision you make after reading us is yours. We are one input, and you should treat us as one input: read the manufacturer’s own documentation, read the retailer’s listing, read the reviews from people who have owned the thing for two years, and then decide.

How may you use the site, and what will get you blocked?

You may read anything here, on any device, as many times as you like, for free, without registering. You may print a guide, save a page to read on a plane, send a link to a friend who is agonising over two machines, or quote us in a forum thread. That is the whole intended use, and we are pleased when it happens.

What we will block, without notice and without correspondence, is behaviour that costs us bandwidth or degrades the site for other readers. In practice that means automated crawling that ignores our robots directives or hammers the server; bulk copying of our tables or text for republication elsewhere; attempts to probe, overload or interfere with the site or its hosting; forging headers or referrers to disguise traffic; laundering our affiliate links through your own; and submitting anything through our forms that is unlawful, abusive, deceptive or designed to spam other readers.

Blocking is the only sanction we normally apply, and it is applied to addresses and to patterns of traffic, not to named individuals. Where behaviour is serious enough to cost us money or expose us to a claim, we may also pursue it further, and you would be responsible for what that costs us to deal with.

Who owns the writing and the photographs?

The prose, the rankings, the scoring notes, the comparison tables, the layout and the original photography on this site are ours, and they are protected by copyright. Writing a guide to twelve machines is weeks of work, and we would rather it stayed here.

Quoting is welcome within ordinary limits. Take a sentence or two, or a single row from a table, name Espresso Tested as the source, and link back to the page you took it from. That is a permission we grant freely and we will not chase anyone who stays inside it. What needs our written agreement first is anything beyond that: reproducing a guide in full or near-full, mirroring or translating our pages, republishing our tables as your own dataset, or ingesting our text and images in bulk to train or fine-tune a model. Ask us before you do any of that rather than after.

Some images on the site are supplied by manufacturers or by retail programmes and remain the property of whoever made them. Those are licensed to us for use in our own pages, and that licence does not travel with a copy you take.

Whose brand names are those?

Every manufacturer name, machine name, model number and logo that appears on this site belongs to its owner. We use them for one reason only: to identify which machine we are talking about. You cannot review a semi-automatic without naming it.

Using a name that way is not a claim of any relationship. Espresso Tested is not affiliated with, authorised by, sponsored by, endorsed by or connected to any espresso machine manufacturer, importer or retailer, and no brand we cover has approved our coverage or seen it before publication. Where a maker has sent us information, or where a page carries a commercial arrangement of any kind, we say so on that page. If you ever read a review here and are unsure who paid for what, ask us and we will tell you.

How does the commission work, and does it buy a place in a ranking?

Most outbound product links on this site are affiliate links, chiefly to Amazon. If you follow one and buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale. Your price is unchanged — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket, and you pay exactly what you would have paid arriving there any other way. This is how the site is funded, and it is why there are no display ads or paywalls in your way.

The commission does not buy placement, and no one can buy placement. A manufacturer cannot pay to be ranked first, to be added to a shortlist, or to have a criticism softened or removed. Commission rates differ between products and between programmes, and we do not order our recommendations by what pays best; where a cheaper machine is the right answer, we say so, even though a cheaper machine earns us less. The fuller version of this, including how we assemble a shortlist, is on our Policy page, and the questions readers ask most often about it are answered in our FAQs.

Following an affiliate link may set a cookie at the retailer’s end so the sale can be attributed to us. That is the retailer’s mechanism operating under the retailer’s privacy terms, not ours.

How fresh are the prices, ratings and specifications?

Treat every number on this site as a snapshot with a date on it, because that is what it is. Prices move weekly and sometimes hourly. Stock appears and vanishes. Star ratings drift as more owners write in. Manufacturers revise a model mid-life, change a boiler, swap a plastic part for steel, or keep the name and alter the contents. A page we researched carefully in March can be wrong in August through no fault of anyone.

So: verify at the retailer before you buy. The price, the availability, the shipping cost, the current rating, the exact model variant, the wattage, the tank capacity, the box contents and the warranty term are all facts the seller states at the point of sale, and the seller’s statement governs. Ours is a guide to what to look for, not a live feed. Where our figure and the retailer’s figure disagree, the retailer is right and we are stale. We correct what we are told about — if you spot something out of date, write to us and we will fix it.

Regional differences catch people out as well. Voltage, plug type, model suffix, included accessories and price all vary by country, and a machine sold under one name in the United States may be sold under another elsewhere, or not sold at all.

Who do you complain to about a machine?

Not us — and this is not evasion, it is the structure of the thing. We are not party to your purchase, so we have no standing in it. Returns, refunds, cancellations, delivery delays, damaged boxes, missing accessories, warranty claims, spare parts and repairs are all matters for the retailer who sold you the machine, and beyond them for the manufacturer who made it. Their terms, their returns window, their warranty. Keep your order confirmation and your receipt, because both of them will ask for it.

On safety, please be careful with what you read anywhere, including here. An espresso machine combines mains electricity, water and steam at temperature and, in a pump machine, roughly nine bars of pressure. Nothing on this site replaces the manufacturer’s manual and safety instructions for your specific model, and where our general description and your manual disagree, follow the manual. Descaling intervals and solutions, pressure or pump adjustment, boiler access, electrical work and any modification to the machine should be done only as the maker directs, or by a service agent the maker recognises. Never remove, defeat or work around a safety device — a thermal cut-out, a thermal fuse, a pressure relief valve, an interlock or an earthed plug is there because the alternative is a burn, a flood or a shock. Doing any of this yourself may also void your warranty. If a machine behaves oddly, trips a breaker, leaks, or vents where it should not, unplug it and speak to the manufacturer.

What happens if you send us something?

Readers write to us constantly, and much of it is useful: a correction, a photo of a scale-blocked shower screen, three years of notes on a machine we only had for weeks, a tip about a variant we had missed. Send whatever you like to reviews@espressotested.com, or through the form on our Contact page.

What you send stays yours. By sending it, you give us permission to publish it, quote from it, edit it for length and clarity, and keep it on the site — free of charge, worldwide, and without a time limit. You are telling us, when you send it, that it is your own work or that you have the right to pass it on, that it is truthful as far as you know, and that publishing it will not infringe anyone’s rights. We are not obliged to publish anything, we may take down anything we have published, and we may attribute a contribution by first name and city or leave it anonymous — tell us which you prefer. We do not pay for submissions and we cannot promise a reply to every one.

If you think something on this site infringes your copyright, email reviews@espressotested.com with a link to the page, a description of the work you own and enough detail for us to see the connection. We take these seriously and act quickly, usually by removing the material while we look into it, and we will come back to you with what we found.

What are we not promising, and how far does our liability go?

The site is offered exactly as it stands, with whatever errors, omissions and outdated figures it happens to contain at the moment you read it. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranty of any kind about it — not that it is accurate, not that it is complete, not that it is current, not that it is fit for whatever you have in mind, and not that it will be reachable when you want it. Guides go out of date, links rot, hosting fails, and a recommendation that was sound last year may be poor advice today.

Where the law permits us to limit what we owe you, we do. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss of any kind — lost profit, lost time, lost data, wasted expenditure, or a purchase that disappointed you — arising from your use of this site or from anything you read on it. Our total liability to you for all claims taken together is capped at five hundred United States dollars (US$500). If your jurisdiction does not allow some of these exclusions, they apply to you only as far as it does allow, and nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud, where the law forbids that limit.

Which law applies, and how do you reach a human?

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Oregon, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of this site is to be brought in the state or federal courts sitting in Multnomah County, Portland, Oregon, and both of us submit to the jurisdiction of those courts. If any provision on this page turns out to be unenforceable, it is severed and the rest stands.

Before it ever comes to that, write to us. One address reaches everyone here — corrections, complaints, copyright, press, licensing questions and anything else: reviews@espressotested.com. Our Contact page has a form if you prefer one, and the FAQs answer a fair number of questions without needing us at all. A real person reads what arrives; if your note is about a factual error in a guide, include the page and we will get to it faster.