How entries are made

Nothing on this site is based on first-hand use. No entry is a review, no page ranks products, and no page says one tool is better than another. Where a page states a preference it is a reading of the vendors' own published facts, and the facts are shown beside it.

An entry begins as a name, a one-line tagline and a URL. For automated entries those come from Product Hunt; for submitted entries, from the maker; for the seeded set, from the vendor's site.

A language model then writes the pros, the cons and the About paragraphs from those fields only. It is instructed to state nothing it cannot derive from them, and its output is filtered: a claim about a field we did not fill in — 'pricing is not disclosed', 'no desktop app' — is removed rather than published as a fact about the product, because it was never one.

The screenshot is an automated capture of the product's homepage. The platform list, where present, is recorded from the source; where we do not know it, the field is empty rather than guessed.

An entry is not published until it has pros or cons. A URL that stops answering is re-checked on later days; an entry is unpublished only when the server confirms the site is gone, never because our probe could not reach it.

A pricing page is read from the vendor's own pricing page by a renderer on the date printed at the top of the page. Both monthly and annual views are captured where a toggle exists. The source is archived and linked, and the captured text is reproduced on the page so the reading can be checked.

A figure that does not appear in the capture is not printed. A plan that cannot be priced from the capture is omitted, not estimated.

A comparison is assembled from the two entries' own records and, where we hold them, their pricing pages. The model is given that fact sheet and nothing else, and every number in its text has to appear in the sheet. The sheet is printed at the bottom of every comparison.

When a pricing page is re-read and the figures change, every comparison built on the old reading is taken down until it is rebuilt.

Generated by a model: pros, cons, About paragraphs, the prose on pricing and comparison pages. Written by a person: blog posts, the alternatives guides, the glossary, and this page. Read from a source and reproduced: prices, plan names, plan limits, screenshots.

Every entry links to the vendor. If ours is wrong, hello@vibedonalds.com — say which page and what the source says instead.