How we review

What that adds up to

Review sites usually advertise how many reviews they hold. That number says nothing about whether any one of them helps you decide. These are the figures we can show instead, measured across the whole corpus in August 2026.

Not every figure is 100%, and we would rather show you which. A dated price stamp exists where we have re-read the vendor's page since publication; where it is missing the review gives the year instead. The month-over-month check covers the tools our Price Watch captured in two consecutive months — 9 of them moved, 113 did not.

The method, step by step

1. Live pricing research. We open the vendor's own pricing page (rendered in a real browser, so JavaScript-built pages and regional pricing don't fool us) and record tiers, meters, billing conditions and trial terms — with the year attached.
2. The dossier. Every tool gets the same five-part treatment: real pricing · the honest knock (the catch the sales page won't tell you) · who it's genuinely best for · who should skip it · and the natural head-to-head comparison.
3. Evidence screenshots. Reviews carry dated captures of the vendor's own pricing page and product — shown as evidence for the figures above, marked with when we took them, and refreshed automatically.
4. Bottom line up front. Every review opens with the verdict in two sentences — worth it for whom, skip it when — so you can decide in ten seconds whether to read on.
5. The same dossier everywhere. Our video reviews, comparison pages and the Honest Software Atlas are all generated from the same researched dossier — one source of truth, no channel where the story conveniently changes.

What happens after we publish

A review is only as good as the day it was written. Most of what we do to keep one true runs after publication, and none of it depends on anyone remembering to check.

1. Monthly captures. Since July 2026 we archive the pricing page of every tool we cover — 397 of them as of August 2026 — once a month. We keep the price lines exactly as they appeared, not a summary of them, plus a fingerprint of the page text. Each month is then compared against the one before.
2. A candidate is not an entry. The comparison finds movement; a person decides what it means. In the first round, July against August 2026, it flagged 24 candidates and 9 became entries on the Price Watch. The other fifteen were a currency selector set differently, pages that failed to load properly, annual rates disclosed for the first time, a feature change with no price change — and one pricing page that was announcing a funding round. A script cannot tell those apart from a price rise. That is why a person reads the raw lines from both months before anything is published.
3. Dates instead of adjectives. 229 of our 397 dossiers carry the date the price was last read against the vendor's own page (August 2026). Where that date is missing, the review gives the year rather than implying it was checked this morning.
4. The build refuses to publish a claim whose evidence is gone. Every entry on the Price Watch is tied to a literal sentence in our own dossier. If later research rewrites that sentence away, the page does not build — it stops, names the entry, and waits for a person. This is not hypothetical: on 22 August 2026 a re-verified dossier no longer carried the sentence behind one of our entries, and the registry stayed frozen until we established that the finding had been rewritten rather than retracted, and restored it.
5. Researched, and we say so. We cover hundreds of tools and cannot run all of them. What we do is read the vendor's own pages, weigh what users report, and keep the two clearly apart. Where we have not used something ourselves, we do not write as though we have — the synthesis is the value, and dressing it up as hands-on time would cost you the ability to tell the difference.

What we never do

• No invented numbers. If a price isn't public, we say so — we don't guess.
• No laundered star ratings. Where a review quotes G2, Capterra or Trustpilot, the score is shown as attributed third-party context with the month we read it — never as our own verdict. Our claims carry their own evidence.
• No pay-to-say. Vendors can't buy a verdict, a ranking, or the removal of an honest knock. Marketplace listings by vendors are always labeled as vendor-submitted.
• No vendor copy-paste. Partner announcements are verified against the live product before a word reaches a review.

Corrections — public, dated, fast

When we get something wrong, we fix it quickly and say so on the page, with a dated correction note — not a silent edit. Vendors are welcome to flag inaccuracies; the fastest way is a reply through any of our partner channels or the contact route on our About page. Recent example: when a vendor pointed out our pricing framing was outdated, the review, its screenshot and the video were corrected within a day — with the note to prove it.

How we make money — and why it doesn't bend the verdict

Reviews contain affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every review discloses this. The reason it doesn't bend the verdict is structural: our “skip it if” sections and critical knocks apply to paying partners exactly as to anyone else — you'll find them on every single review, including our best-earning ones. An honest “skip it” today is why you'll trust the “worth it” tomorrow.

Reader reviews

Readers can leave their own experience on every review page. Critical reviews are published — our only filter is spam. We don't aggregate them into a score while the volume is small, because a rating built on three opinions is a number pretending to be data.

Who does this

The research and every verdict come from Daan (Daniel Haket) — twenty years in international banking (trade finance, operations, risk & control) before building this platform on the tools he actually runs. The ex-banker filter is simple: does a tool remove a real cost bigger than what it charges?