For a long while, Honey operated in that rarefied tech space of being both vaguely useful and largely unexamined. It popped up politely in your browser, surfacing some coupons, saving a few pounds here and there, and generally staying out of trouble. But that low-ke y presence began to wear thin once creators and affiliate marketers started doing the math - and noticed, increasingly, that the math wasn’t adding up in their favour.
At the heart of the issue is something called cookie hijacking. It sounds like a term cooked up by your most paranoid uncle, but alas, it’s real. When you click on a link from a YouTuber, podcaster, or blog, it sets a “cookie” - a little data marker - to let the retailer know who brought the sale in. That cookie also tells the payment system who to credit, meaning commissions go to the right place. Honey, a PayPal-owned browser extension billed as a high-minded coupon scouter, is being accused - quite credibly, and in some detail - of replacing those cookies at checkout.
The Affiliate Grey Zone
The practice isn’t new. Coupon and cashback sites have long relied on a last-click attribution model, which gives credit to whoever touched the checkout page last. But Honey, by quietly injecting itself into that final moment in the buying process, has been accused of cutting into the already-precarious margins of small content creators who rely on affiliate links not as a hobby, but as their actual revenue stream.
YouTuber MegaLag demonstrated exactly how this works: a viewer clicks their special affiliate link, browses, adds a product to their cart… and then Honey pings to life at checkout, slipping in its own affiliate ID and crediting itself for the sale. Same product, same discount. But the commission? Rerouted.
This isn’t a technical glitch. It’s an intentional choice - the foundation of Honey’s business model. The downside is subtle but real: Honey functions best when it’s invisible. And what it invisibly rewrites is more than just tracking code. It’s someone else’s paycheck.
Consumers Save, Creators Lose
To be clear: the consumer still wins. Discounts get applied. The checkout experience is mostly painless. But a growing number of savvy shoppers (and some ethically minded ones) are noticing the collateral damage. If you'd like the personal finance vlogger whose video you watched to keep making more, Honey’s interference could be eating into their incentive to bother.
The irony? For all its tech polish and PayPal acquisition sheen (£4 billion, in case you forgot), Honey still misses about as many working codes as it finds. Anecdotally, it can apply ten coupon tries, fail at all of them, then take credit for one that was already available publicly. You save 12%; Honey collects as if it’s Aladdin - and the lamp belonged to someone else.
The Privacy Question
Beyond affiliate ethics, there's the more sober question of access and visibility. Honey interacts with checkout pages, meaning it has privileged access to baskets, pricing, and occasionally shopper data. Security analysts, such as Tom Richardson, point out that this gives extensions like Honey a man-in-the-middle position - powerful, often opaque, and susceptible to wider misuse. The company claims its systems are privacy-first and that data isn’t sold, shared, or accessed by third parties without consent. But it’s worth noting: we only have their word for that.
Privacy policies, like coupon codes, tend to be more generous in the abstract than in practice.
Alternatives and Workarounds
If you're tired of playing digital Whac-A-Mole, there are other coupon tools that avoid playing God with affiliate links. Pouch and DealFinder by Capital One are two examples that generally stay within their lane, offering promo codes without reassigning commission credit. They aren’t perfect - neither nails every available code - but they’re more transparent in execution.
If you want to keep using Honey, fine. Just do so thoughtfully. Best practice: disable the extension when you're buying through a creator’s link or accessing NHS-exclusive deals like here on Lexoo. It’s one extra click, but those clicks are currency to the people who helped you discover the product in the first place.
The Fine Print of “Free” Tools
Honey is still free to download, still easy to use, and still occasionally earns its keep. If you go in understanding the tradeoffs - and adjust your usage accordingly - it’s a functional baseline tool. But don’t confuse free with neutral. Behind the scenes, someone’s always paying.d And it might not be you.
Shipping, pricing, and returns remain controlled by the retailer, not by Honey. Refund processes may bypass any cashback earned. The codes themselves? Frequently recycled, mostly public. No magic - just scraping and a quietly aggressive affiliate ID.
The next time you click “Apply Coupons,” you might just pause. That little “Searching for the best code…” spinner is doing more than you think. And credit, as it turns out, is in short supply.