Guide
How we check every tool: the 5-step review
This site's whole pitch is that a human checked every listing. That phrase means something specific, and this guide is the written account of it. These are the five steps every tool goes through before you ever see it on the directory, the notes we keep, and the reasons a tool gets skipped — so you can judge for yourself how much weight to give the word "checked".
Step 1: does it actually work, right now?
The first check is the simplest and the one scraped lists never do: we use the tool for a real task. Not a test prompt from the marketing page — an actual piece of work with a result that is either usable or not.
A service that is broken, gated behind an endless waitlist, or quietly requires a paid plan to do anything useful fails here. It does not matter how good its landing page is. Roughly a third of the tools we evaluate never make it past this step.
Step 2: who actually makes it?
We identify the provider: the company or project behind the tool, where it is based, and whether they are straightforward about who they are. An AI tool with no attributable maker — no about page, no company, no names — is a data-risk red flag and does not get listed, however well it works.
This is also where location matters. Some people specifically want European tools under EU jurisdiction, or want to know when a service runs somewhere with different data laws. The provider section of each listing records this plainly.
Step 3: pricing facts, from the provider's own pages
Pricing is checked against the provider's own pricing page — never against another directory, another blog, or a cached memory of what it used to cost. What we record: the pricing type (free, freemium, free trial, paid), what the free tier actually includes, and where its limits sit.
If the free tier's exact limits are not published as firm numbers — more common than you would think — the listing says so rather than inventing a figure. Where third-party sources disagree on a number, the listing tells you they disagree. A listing that cannot state its pricing honestly does not get polished wording to hide it.
Step 4: a clean link, on the provider's own domain
The Get Access button must point at the provider's own site, over https, with no tracking wrapper in between. We check the destination the way a reader arrives at it: click, land, confirm you are where you expected to be.
The rare exception is a referral link, and the rule is disclosure: if the owner of this site earns anything from a link, the listing says so in plain text — you can see an example on the listing that carries one. Direct links are also marked as direct on the listing page, so the distinction is always visible.
Step 5: a description written from scratch, with honest limits
Every description is written after using the tool — never generated from the provider's marketing copy, never assembled from other sites' reviews. It answers the same questions every time: what does it do, who is it for, how do you start, and what are the limits.
The limits matter most. Every listing carries an amber box called "The honest limits, stated plainly" — the things the marketing page leaves out: usage caps, hardware requirements, data-handling realities, quality caveats. If we would not want to discover a limit after committing to a tool, it belongs in that box.
What happens after a listing goes up
Checking is not a one-time event. Each listing shows the month its facts were last confirmed. Listings are re-checked periodically as routine, immediately when a provider announces changes, and immediately when a reader writes in with a correction.
And the status badge on every card tells you how strong the check was: "Verified" means the owner used the tool first-hand; "Listed" means the facts were checked against the provider's own pages but the tool has not been used hands-on; anything weaker is labelled "Pending review" or "Unverified". The badge is a promise about process, and this guide is the process.
What disqualifies a tool
Broken or bait-and-switch free tiers, no identifiable provider, hostile data practices buried in the terms, links that route through trackers, pricing that cannot be confirmed, or a product that simply does not do what it claims. Tools that fail are skipped silently — you will never see a shill listing here with a caveat buried at the bottom.