I like to make my own. I find many of the commercial mixtures are too water retentive for seed starting, and often encourage mold growth on the surface.
Renais

I use peat pellets for germinating. No mold, no dampening off, no watering problems, no problems whatsoever. My neighbor keeps and reuses everything and everything that ever came in a pot or a six pack. She could sprout rocks!

It all seems to be more about method than material.

peat pellets sounds like something maybe i should read into then.

Renais could i ask what your ratio and what ingredients you use?

Most of the people I know that used peat pellets had nothibg but trouble with them.

I crumble the peat pellets and use them like a loose potting soil.

I use the peat too and it's really trouble free for me. Peat or commercial mixes or sterilized garden soil or bowls of sand are no different than anything else in that you need to have your materials somehow match up with your techniques. I think people try different things and when they hit on something that works, whether it's on the first try or the tenth, they stop looking, so experimentation is a great idea in my book. With the right technique you could start seeds in crushed glass marbles, but there's no way I'd try. I tried peat pellets once and they worked.

Pro-Mix BX is my preferred seed starting mix. It's a sphagnum moss peat based mix.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pro-Mix BX

I make my own. mostly from a thin layer of dirt from under my large pile of leaves, through a sieve (hardware cloth) first. worm castings and finely ground soil essentially. I usually need to have several bags of it in the garage, due to a lot of shoots being grown in winter, and also that onions and other things are started indoors when the soil is still frozen.