About Gear & Grade
Who writes this site, why it exists, and the specific things it refuses to do.
Why this site exists
Buying a first road or gravel bike is a strange experience. The sites that explain the vocabulary are usually thin and out of date. The sites that are genuinely good — the magazines with test fleets and staff photographers — assume you already know what a groupset is, what 700x40c means, and why anyone would care about tire clearance. Nobody writes for the person in between: the one about to spend eight hundred to two thousand dollars who is slightly embarrassed to ask what a cassette is.
That is the entire gap this site is written into. Every page here is measured against one test: could someone who has never owned a drop-bar bike read this start to finish and act on it, without opening a second tab to look up a word? If not, the page is not finished.
Who writes it
One person: Stephen V.. Stephen is an enthusiast who got genuinely interested in drop-bar bikes and then got annoyed at how they are written about. He does not own the bikes on this site and has not ridden them. What he does is read the manufacturer spec sheets and owner's manuals, work out the gear ratios and the real out-the-door cost, check what is actually in stock, and then say plainly which bike he would tell a friend to buy — and which one he would tell them to skip.
That is deliberately a modest claim, and it is a true one. There is no editorial team, no test fleet, no workshop, and no credential. What there is: a habit of reading the actual manufacturer listing rather than three other reviews of it, doing the arithmetic on what a bike really costs once you have added the helmet and the shorts and the pump, and being willing to write “the listing does not say” instead of guessing.
What this site refuses to do
We never claim to have ridden a bike we have not ridden
We own none of the bikes on this site. Every other site in this category implies otherwise, and that is exactly why we say it on every page rather than burying it here.
We never invent a price
Prices come straight from Amazon and expire on their own after 48 hours. If a number cannot be verified it disappears and the button says 'Check price' instead. There is no version of this site that shows you a remembered number.
We never invent a specification
If a listing does not publish the weight, the tire clearance or the frame material, the table says 'Not published'. An empty cell is a finding about that listing, not a gap in our research.
We never publish a testimonial or a star rating
We have no customers and we run no tests, so we have no reviews and no ratings to report. A clean page beats an invented one, and self-authored rating markup is the fastest way to lose a search engine's trust.
We never let commission decide a ranking
The fastest way to lose a reader about to spend two thousand dollars is to sell them the wrong bike. Where the cheaper option is the better buy, that is the one at the top.
We never recommend without naming who should skip it
Every single pick on this site carries a 'skip this if' line. A comparison where everything is excellent is a sales sheet, and it reads like one.
Who it is for
Someone buying their first drop-bar bike. Not their first bike ever — you can probably ride — but their first bike with the curly handlebars, the one where the vocabulary suddenly gets dense and every review assumes context you do not have. If you already know what a 2x11 GRX drivetrain is and why you might want one, this site is not really for you, and you will find better depth at the magazines.
Who publishes it
Gear & Grade is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC. It is funded entirely by affiliate commission — we earn a percentage when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model, stated plainly, and there is a full page explaining exactly how it works.
Getting things wrong
A site built on reading listings carefully will occasionally read one wrong, and listings themselves change without notice. If you find something incorrect, tell us — it goes to a real inbox at info@gearandgrade.com and the correction policy is not a formality. Our editorial policy sets out what happens next, and how we pick covers the research process in full.
Last reviewed .