Methodology: How We Research & Fact-Check

This page explains how every comparison on this site is put together, so you can judge the numbers yourself rather than take our word for them.

Where our pricing and feature figures come from

For every figure we publish, we try to check it directly against the vendor's own pricing or security page first. Where a direct fetch of a vendor's page wasn't accessible in a given research session, we cross-reference at least two independent secondary sources rather than publish a single, unverified number. When those sources agree, we treat the figure as solid. When they disagree — this has happened, for example, on Fathom's exact Premium price and on tl;dv's CRM-sync tier placement — we say so explicitly in the article and report a range or the disagreement itself, instead of silently picking whichever number looked more convenient.

Dates and freshness

SaaS pricing changes without much notice. Every article states the date it was last verified. Treat any figure as directionally accurate as of that date, and check the vendor's current pricing page yourself before making a purchasing decision — we update articles when we catch a change, but we don't claim real-time accuracy.

How affiliate relationships are handled

See our full advertising & affiliate disclosure for exactly which tools we have a paid relationship with. The short version: rankings are ordered by the price and feature data cited in each article, never by which program pays the highest commission, and every article discloses its specific affiliate relationships (or lack of one) at the top, before a single ranking claim.

Our track record on corrections

We'd rather be transparent about a mistake than pretend it never happened. In September 2026, an earlier draft of our free/budget comparison article stated a pricing-ranking claim that was wrong on the article's own numbers, and that error happened to favor a tool that runs an affiliate program over a cheaper competitor that doesn't. We caught this in independent review, corrected it the same day, and left a dated correction note directly in the article rather than editing it away silently. Since then, every price comparison on this site gets checked against independent sources, and against our own prior articles, before publication — including a case where doing so meant explicitly stating that one of the tools that runs an affiliate program (Fireflies.ai) happens to be the cheapest fully-capable option in a specific comparison, with the sourcing shown rather than asserted.

What we don't do

We don't publish fabricated reviews or testimonials. We don't claim a compliance certification (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.) for a vendor unless that vendor states it on their own security or compliance page. We don't guess a price and round it to something that sounds authoritative — where we can't confirm a figure, the article says so.