How we test
The problem this site exists for
Every SaaS pricing page is a piece of marketing. It tells you the headline price and the best-case feature list. It does not tell you which limits are hard, what “unlimited” excludes, what the upgrade prompt says when you hit a wall, or what your invoice looks like three months in. Help docs don’t either — they’re written to close support tickets. So the only way to know what a tool actually costs is to buy it, run it, and hit the walls. That’s what we do.
How a page gets made
- 01
We register or buy the account.
Free tiers are tested on real free accounts. Paid claims come from plans we’ve paid for. No vendor-provided demo accounts, no press access, no affiliate-manager screenshots.
- 02
We test the limits.
Contact caps, funnel caps, send quotas, credit conversions, feature gates — pushed until the wall appears, then documented: what the counter shows, what the prompt says, what’s greyed out.
- 03
We screenshot the evidence.
Every screenshot on a page states the exact claim it proves and the date it was taken. If we can’t show it, we don’t claim it.
- 04
We do the math.
Break-even points, real cost per month after usage fees, when the upgrade pays for itself — calculated, not asserted.
- 05
We publish the receipt.
Every article ends with a Proof Ledger: which account we used, when we tested, what evidence exists, which vendor page we checked it against, and what’s changed since.
What “checked” means
The green checked stamp on a guide means a named person rechecked every price and limit on that page against the live product on that date. If nothing changed, the changelog says so. If something changed, the changelog says what. We never bump a date without an actual re-check — the changelog is the audit trail.
- The check
- A named person rechecked every price and limit on the guide.
- The date
- The day it was checked against the live product.
- The trail
- Every check lands in the guide’s append-only changelog.
The receipt on every guide
This is the Proof Ledger that closes every guide — shown here as a specimen:
Proof Ledger
✓ Trust receipt- Account used
- Free plan (own account) — specimen
- Tested on
- Evidence
- Specimen claim — the exact tested fact and its capture date appear here.screenshot · specimen-contact-limit.webp
- invoice · specimen-invoice.webp
- Sources checked
- Vendor pricing pageSpecimen vendor price and plan limits checked on the stated date.
- Changes since last check
- No changes since the previous check (specimen entry).
- Disclosure
- Each guide states its own affiliate relationship here. Read the full disclosure.
What counts as evidence
| To claim… | We require… |
|---|---|
| A price | The live pricing page — and where a payment exists, the invoice or billing screen. |
| A limit | Hitting the wall in-product: the counter, the block, or the upgrade prompt — screenshotted. |
| A fee or overage | The charge shown in the dashboard or on the bill, not in the docs. |
| A verdict | The math on the page: break-even points and real monthly cost. |
| A change | An append-only changelog entry naming what moved and when. |
Rechecks
Published guides are rechecked on a rolling basis, pricing pages first. When a vendor changes something between our checks, the page may briefly lag reality — the checked date tells you exactly how fresh the page is. Once the email changelog launches, it will announce every change we catch.
What we don’t do
Always
- We register or buy the account.
- We test the limits.
- We screenshot the evidence.
- We do the math.
- We publish the receipt.
Never
- We don’t publish claims we haven’t tested or sourced to the vendor’s live pages.
- We don’t fabricate screenshots, testimonials, or usage numbers. Ever.
- We don’t take payment for coverage, rankings, or verdicts. (We earn affiliate commissions on some links — disclosed on every page — and the verdict is never for sale: when a cheaper or better rival wins, the page says so.)
- We don’t hide negative findings. Walls, nerfs, and gotchas are the point of the site.
How these pages are written
The evidence is human; the drafting is assisted. Tests, screenshots, invoices, and verdicts come from a person operating real accounts. AI tooling helps structure and draft around that evidence — every number still traces to a test or a cited vendor page, and a person signs off on every claim before it publishes. Human evidence, AI-assisted publishing. The order matters.