How we review

A short, checkable method. If a review of ours doesn't do these things, it isn't finished.

What we read

The whole sales page, top to bottom, including the disclaimer block that almost nobody scrolls to. In our experience the footer disclaimer is where a product tells you the truth about itself, in language written by a lawyer rather than a copywriter. We also read the seller's terms, refund policy and — where it's public — the material they publish for marketing partners, which is often far more candid about how the product is made.

What we check

• What is delivered. The concrete artefact: file, email, physical item, access to something. Not the feeling promised.
• What it costs, and when you learn that. Whether the price is visible before you commit time or data.
• What the refund actually is. Length, who processes it, and what you need to keep in order to claim it.
• The gap between the pitch and the small print. Where the marketing language and the legal language describe different products, that gap is the review.
• Who should not buy it. Every product has people it will disappoint. We name them.

What we refuse to claim

We don't say a product is guaranteed to produce a result. We don't present opinion as verified fact, or describe an outcome as typical when we have no basis for knowing that. Where a seller's own disclaimer contradicts their headline, we quote the disclaimer rather than the headline.

We also don't run the standard affiliate hook of asking whether something is a fraud in order to catch searches. It's a cheap trick, it prejudges a product we may find perfectly reasonable, and it's unfair to sellers.

What we don't do — yet

We're a new and small operation, and we'd rather state our limits than imply capabilities we don't have. We do not currently buy every product we write about, and where we haven't, we say so and confine ourselves to what can be verified from the seller's published material. We don't run lab tests. We don't have a panel of testers. Where a review rests on documents rather than hands-on use, that's what the review will tell you.

How we're paid

Affiliate commission. If you buy through a link here, the seller pays us a share and your price is unchanged. We are never paid to write a favourable review, and no seller sees a review before it's published or has any right to change it.

The obvious conflict is that we earn more when you buy. Our only structural defence against it is order: the caveats and the "skip it if" list come before the link on every page, so the case against buying is the part you can't miss. Judge us on whether we keep doing that.