How we capture, verify, and rank.

Pricing capture

• Source. Pricing comes from each vendor's own published pricing page. We link to that URL on every tool profile under "Source," along with the date of last capture.
• Capture method. Two paths: hand-curated from the pricing page (slow, accurate) or automated via a per-vendor Playwright extractor (scales weekly). Each plan records which method captured it.
• Confidence-aware merging. When a scraper run returns low-confidence prices (failed regex, empty slice), the prior verified price is preserved and the page is flagged scraper: stale. We never overwrite verified data with low-confidence data.
• Editorial preservation. Editorial fields (descriptions, pros, cons, best-for, not-for, plan taglines, plan notes, plan features) are never touched by the scraper. Only price points and limit values are eligible for automated update.
• Refresh cadence. Target is weekly, currently moving toward an automated GitHub Actions schedule. Manual re-capture happens when a vendor announces a major pricing change.

Ranking

• No editorial 'best' verdicts. Where a page ranks tools (alternatives lists, category leaderboards), the order is derived strictly from data we capture. We do not say "Tool X is better than Tool Y" without a per-pair argument we can stand behind.
• Sort order. Free-plan-first, then ascending entry monthly price (the headline anchor we capture from each vendor), then alphabetical. Custom-priced tools sort last unless we have a comparable monthly anchor.
• Tags are derived facts. Pills like "Cheaper entry," "Has free plan," "More plan tiers," "Enterprise tier" are computed from each tool's stored fields, not editorial picks.
• Coverage. A tool only appears on alternatives or category pages if we actively track it. We never link out to a competitor we haven't verified.

Editorial copy

• Pros and cons. Hand-written from the vendor's documentation, public reviews, and first-hand reading of the pricing page. Pros must be specific (not "great UI"). Cons must be discriminating (not "no free trial" if every competitor also lacks one).
• Best-for / not-for. Audience targeting, written to help a buyer self-disqualify quickly. When a tool is the wrong fit for a use case we point at the better alternative by name.
• Tagline and description. Plain language. Marketing fluff (synergy, leverage, transform) is rewritten or removed.

Affiliate disclosure

• We earn affiliate commissions on some of the tools we cover. Where a link triggers a commission, the link carries rel="sponsored".
• Affiliate status does not change ranking. A free-plan tool with no affiliate relationship outranks a paid tool that pays us, if the data says so.
• Where a vendor has no affiliate program, we still cover the tool when it's a meaningful option in its category. Editorial coverage is decided by usefulness to the buyer, not by program availability.

Corrections

Pricing changes, vendors rebrand, plans get retired. If something on the site is wrong, email [email protected] with the URL and what's off. Every page also links to the source URL we captured from, so you can verify against the live vendor page directly while we triage the correction.