A score you canrecompute yourself
Six criteria, public weights, one line of reasoning per rating. The number on every review is arithmetic on the ratings below.
Six criteria, 100 points
Each criterion is rated 1 to 5. The weight says how much of the 100 it can move.
Can a product be listed without paying, and what does the free route ask for: a badge or a link on your site, upvotes for others, a long queue?
Does the listing link to the product with a followed link, as the site states or as a public catalog of directories records it?
How many people search Google for the site by name each month, worldwide (Keyword Planner), in the same fixed steps for every site?
How long from submitting to a live page: the time the site states, and the launch date it gave us?
Plans, prices, rules and review times published in the open, before an account.
What submitting takes: the sign-in options, the length of the form, captchas, and extras the form demands.
Scale
What a review is built on
Every review on this site is built from pages the vendor publishes: the price list, the FAQ, the documentation, the homepage. We read each page, quote what it says, and record the date. The quote and the date sit in the sources list at the foot of the review, numbered, so a reader can check any figure against the page it came from.
We didn't run traffic through any vendor, and no review claims we did. A success rate on this site is always the vendor's own statement and is labelled as such. A speed or latency figure is either a figure the vendor commits to on its pricing page, a ceiling it advertises, or a live counter we read on the day, and the review says which.
How the score is computed
Six criteria, each rated 1 to 5 with one line of reasoning that cites the facts. The score out of 100 is the weighted sum of the ratings (free route 25, the link 20, reach 20, speed 15, transparency 10, effort 10), each rating counting its share of the weight: 1 of 5 on every criterion scores 20 and 5 of 5 on every criterion scores 100. Nothing else enters the number: no editorial adjustment, no rounding toward a vendor, no bonus for being a partner. The weights are in the panel above and are the same for every vendor.
The arithmetic changed on 7 October 2026, for every vendor at once: until then a rating of 1 counted nothing and a 2 a quarter of its weight, which read harsher than the reviews themselves. The same day popularity joined the rubric: Google's worldwide monthly searches for the brand name, in fixed steps (50,000 and more is 5 of 5, 20,000 is 4, 5,000 is 3, 1,000 is 2, below that 1).
Grades follow the score: 85 and above is excellent, 70 to 84 good, 55 to 69 fair, below 55 weak. A rating of 1 on the free route, for instance, means a site lists nothing without payment; a 5 means a free listing with no badge, no link back and no queue.
What we don't do
No affiliate links. No paid placements, sponsored reviews or score changes for money. No ranking by who asked. Popularity counts only as its published criterion, measured the same way for every vendor. A vendor that publishes more gets a higher transparency rating, which is the only way to move a score from the vendor's side: publish the number.
- No affiliate or tracking links to any vendor.
- No payment from any vendor reviewed, in any form.
- No estimates where a vendor publishes nothing; the absence is rated instead.
Updates and corrections
Prices in this market change without notice. Each review carries two dates: the day it was first published and the day its facts were last re-read. When a page changes, the review shows the new number and the new date, and the old figure goes. If a figure here doesn't match the vendor's page today, tell us at [email protected] with the page URL and we'll re-read it.
Run a submission site?Get it on the record.
Send us the pages that state your plans, your review times and your link rules. We read them, score them on the public rubric, and publish the review with the date.