How we compare subscriptions

Most subscription comparisons you'll find are written either by the company selling one of the products, or by a site that ranks whichever service pays the most. This page explains exactly how ours are put together, including what we don't do.

We don't test products in-house

We do not buy, install, and personally trial every service on this site, and we never write as though we have. You will not find invented first-person accounts here — no "after three months of daily use" stories about products nobody on this site has used.

What we do instead is aggregation: we read the providers' own documentation and every credible review we can find, then synthesise what they collectively say. That's a real job, and it's one neither the vendors nor the review platforms actually do.

Where our information comes from

• The provider's own site — pricing, plan tiers, feature limits, free-tier restrictions, and cancellation terms. This is our primary source for anything factual about what you get.
• Review platforms — G2, Capterra, TrustRadius and Trustpilot, read for recurring themes rather than headline scores. A single one-star review means little; the same complaint appearing in two hundred of them means a great deal.
• Public discussion — Reddit and subject-specific forums, where people describe what happened after the trial ended.
• Change history — price increases, feature removals and plan restructures, which providers rarely advertise but which often matter more than the current price.

Every article says when it was last checked

Subscription pricing changes without notice, and affiliate-focused articles across the web are notorious for quoting figures that were already stale when published. Each of our articles carries a "prices and plan limits last checked" date near the top. If that date is old, treat the numbers as a starting point and confirm on the provider's site.

How we rank

• Commission never affects position. We are not paid to rank anything, and we do not reorder a list because one provider pays better than another.
• We include services that pay us nothing. If the best answer to a question is a free tool, or a provider with no affiliate programme, it goes in the comparison anyway. A list containing only services that pay us isn't a comparison.
• We recommend cancelling when that's the answer. Plenty of subscriptions aren't worth keeping. Articles about cancelling a service do not carry affiliate links to that service — being paid when you sign up for something we just told you to leave would be a straightforward conflict of interest.
• We name the trade-offs. Every service is a bad fit for someone. If we can't say who shouldn't buy it, we haven't researched it well enough to publish.

How we make money

Some links on this site are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission when you subscribe through them at no extra cost to you. The full details are on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If a price, plan limit, or claim on this site is wrong, tell us via thecontact page and we'll correct it and note the update date on the article. We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong in public.