Most “best software” articles are written by companies selling software. Search for alternatives to almost any popular tool and the first page is full of vendors explaining, at length, why the best alternative happens to be their own product.
That’s not a conspiracy, it’s just marketing. But it means the reader has no way to tell whether a recommendation came from evidence or from a product roadmap.
This page explains how we work, and — more usefully — the limits of what we can tell you.
We’re not selling software
We don’t make a tool. We have nothing to protect, no product to position, and no reason to bury a competitor.
That’s the one thing this site has that a vendor blog structurally cannot have, and everything below follows from it.
How much we’ve used a tool, stated on the page
Reviews on this site fall into three levels, and we say which one applies:
Used in production
We run our own business on it, or have done. These reviews include screenshots from our own account and cover the things you only learn after months — where it slows down, what breaks at volume, what the support experience is actually like.
Hands-on
We’ve created an account, set the tool up, and used it enough to judge the interface, the setup process and the real cost. Enough to recommend or rule out. Not enough to tell you what year three looks like.
Researched
We haven’t run it ourselves. The assessment comes from documentation, pricing pages, verified user reviews at volume, and comparison against tools we do know. Useful for narrowing a shortlist, not for making the final call alone.
Most “best of” articles blur these three together and present all of it with the same confidence. We’d rather tell you which one you’re reading.
What we look at
Real cost at your size, not entry price. Advertised pricing is close to meaningless in this market. Plans are billed annually to make the monthly number look smaller, contact limits reset the price as your list grows, and features move into higher tiers between plan revisions. We work out what a tool costs at the volume you actually have, and we flag when an entry price is promotional.
The ceiling. Where the tool stops working for you. Every product is fine at the start; what matters is the point at which you have to migrate.
Export and lock-in. Whether you can get your data out, in what format, and how much of your setup survives the move. A tool that’s hard to leave deserves more scrutiny before you arrive.
Who it’s wrong for. Every recommendation on this site names the reader who should skip it. A tool that suits everybody suits nobody in particular.
What we don’t do
We don’t score out of ten. A number implies precision we don’t have. We say who a tool is right for and who should avoid it, because that’s the actual question.
We don’t cover enterprise. This site is written for freelancers, small businesses, agencies and creators. If you’re buying software for a 400-person company, our conclusions won’t transfer.
We don’t refresh a date and call it an update.
Pricing goes stale, and we show you when
Software pricing changes constantly, and out-of-date pricing is the most common failure in this genre. Kajabi restructured its plans in January 2026 and a good share of the articles ranking for “Kajabi alternatives” still quote the old numbers.
Every price on this site carries the date we checked it. If that date is old, treat the number as a starting point and confirm on the vendor’s page. A visible date is more honest than a figure that pretends to be permanent.
We re-check pricing on our most-read pages regularly, and immediately when we learn a vendor has changed plans.
When we get it wrong
We will get things wrong. Features change, research misses things, and sometimes we misjudge a product.
When that happens we correct the page and note what changed at the bottom of it. A correction you can’t see isn’t a correction.
Found something wrong? hello@saasandstacks.com