About SmokeTastic
SmokeTastic is an independent vaping review site, run by two people, funded by advertising and affiliate commission, and answerable to the readers who use it to make a decision about their own health.
It started because one smoker wanted a straight answer about a device nobody had reviewed properly yet. That’s still the whole job.
Who runs SmokeTastic
Nick King is the owner and founder. He built the site in 2012, is self-employed, and SmokeTastic is not owned by, funded by or part of any manufacturer, distributor, retailer or publishing group. There is no parent company and no outside investor — which matters mostly because it means there is nobody upstream who can lean on a verdict.
Adrian King is the Chief Editor. He decides what gets covered, sets the standard a review has to meet before it goes live, and is the name on the reviews. If something on this site is wrong, he is the person accountable for it, and adrian@smoketastic.com reaches him directly.
That’s the whole masthead. We’d rather tell you that than imply a newsroom we don’t have.
How SmokeTastic started
I started smoking late — late twenties, in an office, and for years I told people it was stress. That wasn’t really true. Everyone I liked at work went outside every hour and I wanted to go with them. A social habit turned into thirty a day and stayed there for over a decade.
I tried patches. They were expensive and they did nothing for me. That was the point I worked out that willpower wasn’t going to be the deciding factor, and that I needed to replace the habit rather than remove it.
Then in 2006 I read a piece on the BBC about a new device for smokers: the electronic cigarette. I’d spent years wondering why nobody had built a cigarette that didn’t set fire to anything, so I was sold on the idea before I’d seen one. I’m a business analyst by training, which mostly means I can’t leave a new thing alone until I’ve taken it apart. I ordered a cigalike the next day.
It didn’t work — not at first. What I actually ended up doing was vaping and smoking, which is not the same as quitting and I’d rather be honest about that. The flavor wasn’t there and the hit landed in the wrong place. Same nicotine on paper, but it never reached my chest. I started writing about it because I assumed I’d done something wrong, and dozens of people wrote back to say they’d hit exactly the same wall.
What eventually got me off cigarettes completely was the eGo — a bigger battery, more vapor, and frankly an uglier device. That’s the detail I’ve kept at the front of my mind ever since: the product that photographs best is very often not the one that gets somebody off cigarettes.
I still vape now, on a small fraction of the nicotine I used to smoke. SmokeTastic grew out of writing that down, and it’s been reviewing vaping products since 2012.
— Nick King, owner
How we review
Our goal is simple: identify the best product in each category and explain why we think it’s the best, in terms that mean something to somebody who is trying to stop smoking rather than somebody who collects hardware.
What we weigh is mostly unglamorous — whether the flavor still holds up after a week, what the thing actually costs to keep running for a year rather than on the shelf, whether it leaks in a pocket, whether the draw suits somebody coming off cigarettes. Specs on the box are the least interesting part of a device.
We’ve written the method down in full, including the parts we don’t do: how we test. We don’t run a laboratory, we don’t publish measurements we can’t produce, and we’d rather say that on the record than let a review imply otherwise. We also don’t claim to be the last word — the decision depends on you and your particular needs. Our job is to make sure you have the information that matters before you make it.
Independence and how we’re funded
Two sources, and we’d rather you knew both. Some links to retailers earn us a commission if you buy; it costs you nothing and doesn’t change the price you pay. And we sell display advertising, which is marked as advertising on the page itself.
Neither one buys a recommendation. Nobody has ever been shown a review before publication, no advertiser gets approval over content or changes to it afterwards, and there is no rate card for editorial. We publish negative verdicts on products we earn commission from. That costs us money and it will again.
The full set of rules — samples, corrections, right of reply, how we use AI tooling in production — is set out in our editorial policy. It’s a real policy, not a page written to be pointed at.
Health, and where our expertise stops
Vaping is a harm-reduction tool for people who already smoke. It isn’t risk-free, we don’t describe it as safe, and nicotine is addictive. If you don’t smoke, don’t start vaping.
Anything on this site touching your health rather than your wallet is a different job from reviewing hardware, and we don’t pretend otherwise. On those pages we point to published research and name the source rather than paraphrasing it, and we state the date a regulatory claim was accurate, because the rules differ by country and by state and they move. Nothing here is medical advice, and nobody writing it is medically qualified. We’d rather say that in plain sight than let a byline imply something it shouldn’t.
This site is for adults of legal purchase age. Nothing on it is aimed at anyone under 18, at non-smokers, or at people who have never used nicotine — whatever that would do for our traffic.
What we won’t do
We turn down almost every guest post request we get. Nearly all of them are backlink trades dressed up as contributions, and letting them through is the quickest way to make a review site worthless. If you have a genuine track record in vaping and something to say, write to us and we’ll read it — but the bar is the same one our own reviews have to clear.
We don’t take conditions attached to a review sample, we don’t remove or soften a negative verdict because a brand asks, and we don’t publish a figure we can’t attribute.
Corrections and contact
We get things wrong. Prices move, formulas get quietly reformulated, a coil batch turns out to be bad. If something here is out of date or simply incorrect, tell us and we’ll check it against the source — that’s genuinely how most of our corrections start, and substantive ones are noted on the page rather than silently overwritten.
Editorial and corrections: adrian@smoketastic.com. Advertising: contact@smoketastic.com, handled separately from editorial, which is the point. You can also use the contact page — we read everything and answer most things within a day or two.
How we handle your data is covered in our privacy policy.
Where to start
If you’re switching from cigarettes, start with the beginner kit guide rather than the flashiest device you can find — and don’t try to quit in one jump. Replace a few smoking breaks with vaping breaks, settle on a nicotine strength that actually satisfies you, and only then start working through pod vapes or a vape pen. If you’re still deciding whether it’s worth it at all, the benefits of vaping is the honest version.