Accountability
The re-test log
Most review sites quietly rewrite old pages and hope you never notice the tool they raved about last year is gone. We keep the receipts instead. Every addition, demotion, price correction, and removal lands in this log with a date and a reason. If this page goes quiet for months, hold us to it. The re-test dates printed on every stack page are promises, and this is where they're kept.
July 2026
- 2026-07-08: Site launch (Research Editions). Four stacks published: Freelance Writers, Solo Consultants, Real Estate Agents, Tradespeople. All labeled Research Edition, meaning picks based on feature analysis, real solo-tier pricing, and documented practitioner experience. First hands-on test cycle is underway; each page gets re-scored with logged results as its cycle completes. Comparisons published: Surfer vs Frase, Jasper vs Claude.
- 2026-07-09: Price corrections (Surfer, CompanyCam). Our price check caught two vendor changes: Surfer discontinued the $89 Essential plan (now Discovery ~$49 / Standard ~$99) and CompanyCam moved from ~$24/user to team plans from ~$63. Writer-stack math updated $141→$151; trades-stack math $85→$125. Original claims preserved here per our correction rule.
- 2026-07-09: Upheal pricing corrected same day it was published. Our therapists stack initially listed Upheal at "from ~$29/month"; the verified model is $1/session capped at ~$69/month. Corrected across the stack page, cheat sheet, and comparison within hours. Stack math updated to ~$70–135/month usage-based.
- 2026-07-09: Notion closed its affiliate program; our ranking didn't move. Notion stopped accepting new affiliates (terms had also changed to ~$50/signup + 20% of year one). Our Notion links now earn $0. Notion remains the pick in the Writers and Developers stacks and the Notion-vs-Coda verdict is unchanged. Commissions never touched the ranking on the way in, so losing one changes nothing on the way out. All labels and the Commission Table updated.
- 2026-07-21: Two comparisons published; Bonsai tier name corrected. Added eRank vs Marmalead and Bonsai vs HoneyBook, both Research Edition with vendor-page-verified pricing. While researching the latter we caught that Bonsai renamed its ~$25 tier from "Starter" to "Essentials" (price unchanged); the Solo Consultants and Freelance Developers pages and cheat sheets previously used the old name and now carry the current one.
- 2026-07-22: Surfer declined our affiliate application; the verdict doesn't move. Surfer's program (~25% recurring, the second-biggest payout on our list) declined us as a new site without traffic history. Result: our Surfer links now earn $0, exactly like our Claude links. The recommendation stays what it always was: in the writer stack, conditional, with the same skip rule ("skip unless SEO is ⅓+ of your income"). The Commission Table is updated. We'll reapply once traffic data exists; the ranking won't be waiting on it.
- 2026-08-06: Fathom declined our partner application; the free tier stays recommended. Fathom's Growth Partner program turns out to be built for agencies and consultants who implement it for clients, not for publications like ours, and our application was declined. Our Fathom links now earn $0, joining Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Notion, and Surfer in that column. The verdict is unchanged: Fathom's free tier is still the meeting-notes pick in the consultant stack and the fallback in the recruiter stack, which was always an odd thing for a commission-driven site to say and a very normal thing for us. The Commission Table is updated.
- 2026-08-13: correcting ourselves. Fathom did not stay declined, and we were three days late saying so. Fathom accepted us into its Growth Partner Program on 2026-08-10, four days after the entry above. We did not notice until reviewing partner accounts on 2026-08-13, so for three days this site claimed we had been declined by a programme that had in fact taken us on. The entry above is left standing because that is what our correction rule requires. Nothing about the verdict moves: Fathom’s free tier was the meeting-notes pick when we thought we would earn from it, when we thought we had been rejected, and now that we know we were accepted. The tracking link is not placed yet, so the links still earn \$0 as this is published, and the commission table now says so.
- 2026-08-13, same day: the Fathom link is live, making it our third paying link. Tracking link placed, so Fathom now earns us a commission where it earned nothing this morning. The on-page labels changed from “not yet an affiliate link” to “affiliate link, active” on the consultant stack, the real estate stack and the head-to-head. What did not change: Fathom’s free tier is still the pick we push, on a page where we now earn only if you upgrade to the paid one. We wrote that recommendation believing Fathom would never pay us anything, and we are not going to quietly upgrade the advice now that it does. eRank, Helium 10 and Fathom are the three links that pay us; the rest of the site earns nothing.
- 2026-08-13: Home inspectors stack published (stack #14). First of a deliberate shift toward professions whose practitioners skew older: licensed, solo, second-career heavy, and almost entirely ignored by AI-tool coverage. The target here is unusually clear, because report writing costs a solo inspector three to four hours per job and none of it is billable. Research turned up something no comparison we found mentions: HomeGauge and Spectora are sold from the same storefront. HomeGauge’s own pricing page lists HomeGauge at $89/month and Spectora at $109/month side by side, each with its own trial button, so the rivalry everyone debates in inspector forums is a choice between two products under one roof. Prices verified August 2026 against US pricing. The page leads with the liability rule rather than the tools: AI writes sentences, the inspector supplies every finding, because the report carries a licence number and “the software wrote it” is not a defence. We also rejected CompanyCam here despite it being the right answer in our trades stack, since both report platforms already handle photos. None of the links on the page pay us anything.
- 2026-08-13: Financial advisors stack published (stack #15), and it inverts our usual conflict. Second of the older-skewing professions. The expensive decision is meeting notes, where advisor-specific tools cost about $100 per advisor a month (Jump) against $0 for a general notetaker’s free tier. Here is the awkward part, stated on the page itself: Fathom pays us and Jump does not. So the cheap pick is the one that earns us money, which is the reverse of the usual affiliate temptation, and we had to be careful in the opposite direction. The page argues both sides on merit: pre-CRM advisors should start free, and practices running a real book in a CRM should seriously consider paying, because the integration is the entire product. We also surfaced the option most comparisons skip, that Wealthbox sells its own notetaker as a $49 add-on, which undercuts Jump for anyone who just wants CRM sync. Prices verified August 2026 against US pricing. The compliance section is the real page: records retention, the Marketing Rule and AI washing, and the client-data vendor question, all flagged as compliance-officer decisions rather than ours.
- 2026-08-13: Insurance agents stack published (stack #16), and it has a hole in it on purpose. Third of the older-skewing professions, and the least price-transparent category we have covered in sixteen stacks. The agency management system is usually the largest software line in an independent agency, and it is the one we could not price. EZLynx, now part of Applied, publishes a page titled How Pricing Works that contains no prices. HawkSoft’s pricing URL returns a 404. We are not going to invent a monthly figure for either, so the page says so and instead lists the five questions to ask on the sales call, including the year-two renewal price and whether AI features are an add-on. AgencyZoom does publish: Essential $149, Growth $199, Pro $349 a month, verified August 2026, and it gets credit on the page for that. The honest headline is that the AI part of this stack costs $20: Claude plus Canva’s free tier. Everything expensive is agency infrastructure with AI features attached. The licence rule leads: the policy document is the contract, AI can help you explain coverage and must never state it. None of the links pay us anything.
- 2026-08-13: sellerboard declined us, hours after accepting. The pick does not move. We were accepted into sellerboard’s programme in the morning and declined in the afternoon, after what their marketing manager described as reviewing our profile again. The stated reason: they issue affiliate links only to partners who have their own channels, social media platforms or courses. We are a publisher rather than a creator with an owned audience, so we do not qualify. Our sellerboard links now earn $0, joining Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Notion, Surfer, Jungle Scout and the rest. sellerboard remains the profit-after-fees pick in our Amazon sellers stack, because it was chosen on merit before any commercial conversation and a decline is not a product review. Worth noting the pattern, since this is the third decline with the same shape: Surfer wanted traffic history, Fathom’s programme was built for agencies implementing for clients, and sellerboard wants creators with channels. Affiliate programmes in 2026 are largely built for audiences someone already owns, not for review sites. That is a real headwind for a site like this and we would rather say so than pretend every silence is a maybe. The Commission Table is updated.
- 2026-08-12: DeepSeek vs ChatGPT published; neither link pays us. Our first comparison covering a Chinese AI tool. The verdict turns on the client-data rule: DeepSeek's free chat is genuinely excellent for your own drafting and code, and its privacy policy states data is stored in the People's Republic of China with no BAA, so client-confidential material never goes in. Prices and policies verified August 2026. Both links on the page earn us $0, making it the cheapest honest opinion we publish.
- 2026-08-12: Amazon sellers stack published (stack #12). Our second e-commerce persona: Claude for listing copy, Helium 10 or Jungle Scout for research (pick one, never both), sellerboard for honest profit numbers, PhotoRoom for images. Research caught that Helium 10 retired its $39 Starter tier for new users, so the page states the real entry price instead of the one every old listicle still quotes. Includes the review-manipulation and AI-listing rules that actually suspend accounts. All prices verified August 2026; none of the new links pay us anything today.
- 2026-08-12, later the same day: Helium 10 approved us; the skip note stays. Our Helium 10 affiliate application was auto-approved hours after the Amazon sellers stack went live, making it the second link on this site that pays us (after eRank). The terms are strong: 100% of a referred subscriber’s first month plus recurring tiers. Which is exactly why we point out that the strictest price warning in that stack sits on Helium 10, written before we earned a cent from it. The Commission Table is updated.
- 2026-08-13: Resellers stack published (stack #13). One persona across four marketplaces: eBay, Poshmark, Mercari and Depop. Claude for descriptions and buyer replies, Vendoo or List Perfectly for crosslisting (run one, never two), PhotoRoom for phone photos, and free eBay sold-listings and Terapeak data for comps, which is the pick we tell you not to pay for. From ~$22/month. The compliance section covers the operational risk that actually costs resellers money: an item that sells on one platform and stays listed on another becomes an oversell, and oversells damage seller metrics on every marketplace involved. Prices verified August 2026; none of the new links pay us anything today.
- 2026-08-13, hours later: Vendoo free-tier claim corrected. The resellers stack said Vendoo offered a free plan of roughly 5 new items a month. Checking Vendoo's pricing page directly while setting up an account showed no free plan at all: the current tiers are Starter, Growth and Pro, with a 14-day free trial instead. Corrected in six places on the stack page, including the recommendation that told readers to start on the free plan. The original claim is preserved here per our correction rule. This is why we verify prices on vendor pages rather than trusting the last article that quoted them.
- 2026-08-13: Two head-to-head comparisons published. Helium 10 vs Jungle Scout and Vendoo vs List Perfectly, both expanding a question the stack pages previously answered in a single paragraph. Prices and verdicts carry over unchanged from the Amazon and reseller stacks, verified August 2026. The Helium 10 page is the first thing we have published around a link that pays us, and the verdict still sends every seller under roughly $5K a month to Jungle Scout or to Helium 10’s free plan: Helium 10 pays our largest commission of any program we are in, Jungle Scout pays us nothing, and the recommendation is unchanged from the day we wrote it with no commission at stake. Neither Vendoo nor List Perfectly pays us anything today.
- 2026-08-13: Metaview price corrected; recruiter stack math rebuilt. Our monthly price check flagged Metaview, and the vendor page confirmed a real change: Metaview has moved to per-agent pricing, and its Notetaker is now a free tier at 25 calls a month or Pro at about $60/month per user. We had published a solo tier at about $25/month, which no longer exists. Corrected on the recruiter stack page and its cheat sheet, and the stack math moves from ~$95/month to ~$72/month on the free tier or ~$132/month with Pro. The original claim is preserved here per our correction rule. The free tier is genuinely good news for solo recruiters and now leads the recommendation.
- 2026-08-13: Three flagged prices re-verified as correct. The same check flagged Surfer, Notion and Calendly. All three are unchanged: Surfer Standard $99/month and Discovery $49/month, Notion Plus $12/month billed monthly and $10 annually, Calendly Standard $12/month billed monthly and $10 annually. The flags were false positives, because those pages render prices with JavaScript and default to annual billing, which our fetch-based checker cannot see. Logged so the next check does not chase them again.
- 2026-08-13, same check: Recruit CRM price was badly wrong; no stack total until we confirm it. Following the currency warning above, we went back to Recruit CRM’s pricing page. It quotes CAD 125 per user per month for Pro and CAD 185 for Business, with no currency selector. We had published about $40/month, which the vendor page does not support at any plausible exchange rate, so that figure is gone. Because the CRM is the dominant line item and we have only seen it in CAD from Canada, we have stopped publishing a single recruiter-stack total until the US price is confirmed. The page now states the three smaller tools at about $32/month and says plainly that the ATS sits on top and is being re-verified. Preserving the original claim here per our correction rule: we said ~$40/month for Recruit CRM and a ~$95/month full stack, and both were wrong.
- 2026-08-13: Frase repriced; the Surfer comparison gets sharper, not softer. Frase has restructured. Starter is now $39/month billed yearly or $49 month to month, and its page states USD explicitly. We published a flat ~$45. Against Surfer Standard at $99/month billed yearly, the like-for-like gap on annual billing is $60/month rather than the ~$54 we claimed, and Frase is well under half of Surfer rather than “about half”. Corrected on the comparison page, the writer stack and its cheat sheet. This one happens to strengthen our verdict, which is exactly why it still gets logged: corrections that flatter us are not a different category from corrections that do not.
- 2026-08-13: Jobber retired the Core plan; the trades stack was understated by about $78 a month. Jobber’s current lineup is Connect at $199/month, Grow at $299 and Plus at $499, all including five users, and the page states all prices are USD. There is no Core tier any more. We published “Jobber (Core) from ~$39/month” and a ~$125/month full stack, both of which assumed a plan that no longer exists. The entry point is now $120/month for the first 12 months billed annually, then $149. Stack math corrected to ~$203/month on the promotional year, ~$232 after it reverts, and ~$282 at list. Fixed across the stack page, its FAQ, the meta descriptions and the cheat sheet. This is the largest single correction we have had to make, and it sat on the most expensive stack we publish.
- 2026-08-13: Virtual Staging AI tiers clarified; a per-photo figure did not match its price. Verified tiers: Basic is $16/month billed yearly or $25 monthly for 6 photos, and Standard is $19/month billed yearly or $35 monthly for 20 photos. Our $16 was right but it is the annual rate for the 6-photo tier, which we did not say. Worse, the agent cheat sheet paired that $16 with “~$1/photo”, and those two do not go together: $16 buys 6 photos at $2.67 each, while ~$0.95 a photo is the Standard tier. Both corrected, and the stack math now states which tier and billing mode the ~$67 total assumes.
- 2026-08-13: Three vendors we could not verify, and why. Closing out the August price sweep honestly. gamma.app sits behind a Cloudflare bot challenge that we cannot pass. canva.com and recruitcrm.io both quote us in Canadian dollars with no currency selector, and Canva sets regional prices independently rather than converting, so the CAD figure cannot be turned back into a reliable USD one. Their published figures are unchanged rather than guessed at. Related near-miss worth recording: claude.com also served us CAD with no label, showing Pro at $28 and Max from $140 against the real $20 and $100. Both are exactly 1.4x. Had we “corrected” that, we would have put a wrong price on roughly thirty pages while looking diligent.
- 2026-08-13, later: the two CAD-blocked prices resolved over a US VPN. Recruit CRM Pro is $95 per user per month in USD, with Business at $135 and up to 20% off on annual billing. We had published ~$40, so the earlier correction was right to remove it. With the ATS figure known, the recruiter stack carries a real total again: ~$127/month on Metaview’s free notetaker tier, or ~$187 with Metaview Pro, against the ~$95 we published for the whole stack before today. Canva came back clean: Pro is US$180 a year for one person, exactly the $15/month we already publish, so nothing changed. Worth recording why the Canadian reading was useless for checking it: Canva shows CAD 142/year there, roughly 42% below a straight conversion, because it prices per region rather than converting. gamma.app remains unverified behind a bot challenge.
- 2026-08-21: Virtual staging page published, and it is mostly about the law. Search data showed people asking us some version of “estate agents ai to stage listings” four different ways, landing on a stack page that answered it in one paragraph. The new AI virtual staging page answers it properly, and the research turned up something our own agent stack was understating. Virtual staging disclosure is no longer only an ethics and MLS-rules question: California AB 723 was signed on 2025-10-10 as Chapter 497, adding section 10140.8 to the Business and Professions Code, and it requires a disclosure on or next to any digitally altered listing image plus a link, URL or QR code to the original unaltered version. “Available on request” does not satisfy it. We also pinned the ethics citation to NAR Standard of Practice 12-10 after finding published guides citing 12-1 instead, which is a different standard. The page states plainly that we have not read individual MLS rulebooks and will not summarise anyone’s from memory. On price, the four verified tiers are laid out with the per-photo arithmetic done, which exposes that Basic is the worst value on the list at $2.67 a photo against Standard’s $0.95, for the sake of $3 a month. And we deliberately did not write the roundup this query wants: we cover one staging tool, because it is the only one already in a stack, and a ranked list of products we have not evaluated is exactly the article we exist to not publish.
- 2026-08-21: a live undercount corrected. Three links pay us, not two. Fourteen pages carried the line “exactly two links on this site pay us anything”. That stopped being true on 2026-08-13 when the Fathom tracking link went live, which the changelog recorded at the time while the disclosure line on every stack page did not get swept with it. Corrected everywhere to three: eRank, Helium 10 and Fathom. Preserving the error here per our correction rule, and noting the shape of it, because this is the failure mode that matters most on a site whose claim is that it tells you who pays it. Understating our own commercial interest is still getting it wrong.
- 2026-08-26: Spectora vs HomeGauge published, and the rivalry does not exist. Our home inspectors stack already called this an either-or choice, but the new Spectora vs HomeGauge comparison settles a question every inspector forum still argues about: they are not two companies. Spectora announced its acquisition of HomeGauge on 2025-04-01, HomeGauge’s own pricing page now carries a logo reading “HomeGauge, a Spectora Company”, sells Spectora right beside it, and points both free-trial buttons at spectora.com. The arithmetic is the other finding. Everyone leads with $89 against $109 and stops. Carried out to a year, HomeGauge is $1,068 and Spectora’s annual plan is $1,090, so the real gap is about $22 a year, not $20 a month, unless you pay Spectora monthly and hand back $240. That moves the decision off price entirely and onto the thing nobody prices: HomeGauge’s classic writer is Windows desktop software and its own FAQ sends Mac owners to Parallels, while Spectora runs in a browser. Also logged: Spectora publishes a second-inspector price ($99/month or $999/year) and HomeGauge’s pricing page publishes none. Both prices verified on the vendor pricing pages on 2026-08-26. Neither link pays us anything and we have applied to neither.
- 2026-09-01: Monthly price pass, and it is the largest set of corrections we have published. Sixteen figures moved, one of them because we got it wrong rather than because a vendor did. In order of how much they change a decision:
- Jobber: we were wrong, and the trades stack was overstated by about $90 a month. In August we published that Jobber had retired its Core tier and that the entry plan was Connect at $199 a month. Core is on Jobber’s pricing page today at $29/month billed annually, $39 on a one-year commitment and $49 month to month. The $199 we quoted is the month-to-month price of Grow, two tiers above Core. The tradespeople stack goes from ~$203/month to ~$112/month. If you priced that stack here in August and walked away, price it again.
- SimplePractice: from ~$29 to $49/month for the Starter plan (Essential $79, Plus $99). This is the largest single increase we have recorded. The therapists stack moves from ~$70–135 to ~$90–153/month.
- Topaz Video AI: ~$299 one-time is now $299 a year. Topaz stopped selling perpetual licences on 2025-10-03. Existing owners keep what they bought; a new purchase is a subscription, Personal $299/year or Pro $699/year. We recommended this tool partly because you bought it once and owned it, and the video editors page now says so plainly.
- Descript: Creator from ~$16 to ~$24/month billed annually ($35 month to month) after a tier restructure; the ~$16 rate now buys Hobbyist. Video editors goes ~$55 to ~$61, real estate agents ~$67 to ~$75.
- Jasper: the ~$49 Creator tier is gone. Jasper Pro is $69/month, $59 billed annually. Against Claude Pro at $20 the gap is now more than three to one, and the verdict on that page was already Claude.
- Fathom Premium: $15 to $20/month ($16 billed annually). Every stack that uses Fathom uses its free tier, so no stack total changed except the solo consultants’ optional upgrade line.
- TaxDome: ~$60 to ~$67/month, billed as $800 per seat per year on a one-year commitment ($750 on two years, $700 on three). Accountants goes ~$110 to ~$112, and to ~$45 without TaxDome.
- Notion Plus: $12 to $10/month. A price cut, which is rarer here than it should be. Freelance writers goes ~$53 to ~$50, freelance developers ~$67 to ~$65, the freelancer hub spine ~$57 to ~$55.
- HoneyBook Starter: ~$39 to $29/month, and it is $29 whether you pay monthly or yearly. Bonsai is still cheaper on annual billing, but by about $10 a month rather than $20.
- Calendly Standard: $12 to $10/month ($8.30 billed annually). Recruiters goes ~$127 to ~$125.
- Reclaim Starter: ~$8 to $10/month. Gamma Plus: ~$10 to $9/month billed annually ($108/year). Solo consultants lands at ~$64, essentially where it started.
- Dext: the tier we named does not exist. There is no Solo or Starter plan for businesses any more, only a Business plan that starts at five users and 250 documents: ~$25/month billed annually ($302.50/year), about $31.50 month to month. We had it at ~$30.
- MagicSchool Plus: ~$8 to $8.33/month billed annually ($99.96/year), $12.99 month to month. The teachers stack total is unchanged at ~$25.
- Vendoo has a free plan, and in August we told you it did not. Their pricing page lists a $0 tier capped at 5 items and 3 background removals, alongside the 14-day trial. Five items will not run a business, but it beats a trial clock as a first look. Corrected on the resellers stack and the Vendoo vs List Perfectly page.
- Blueprint’s free Core tier is gone. We described it as a real evaluation rather than a teaser. Blueprint now charges $0.99 per session alongside your existing EHR or $1.49 for its all-in-one, after 5 free sessions or a 30-day trial, with no monthly cap. That makes Upheal’s ~$69 cap the whole difference between them.
- Metaview no longer publishes a notetaker price. Its pricing page now lists sourcing-agent tiers only ($0 for the first 100 profiles, $100/user/month for 200, $300 unlimited), and the notetaker sits inside a quoted bundle. We have removed the “free tier: 25 calls a month” claim because we can no longer confirm it, and marked the ~$60 figure as last-confirmed rather than current.
Two things we could not verify, said out loud rather than quietly restamped. Artlist’s pricing page now leads with its AI plans and gives the stock Music and SFX tiers no reachable URL of their own, so we could not read the current figure on the vendor’s own page. The ~$17 on the video editors page is July’s number carried forward, and it is flagged there as such. ChatGPT’s Pro tier gave us conflicting readings, so we removed the $200 figure from the DeepSeek comparison rather than guess. Free, Go at $8 and Plus at $20 are confirmed.
One name change worth knowing: coda.io/pricing now redirects to superhuman.com/plans/docs, and Coda is sold as Superhuman Docs alongside Grammarly and Superhuman Mail. Doc Maker billing and the tiers are unchanged at $12 per maker billed annually, $15 month to month. Nothing about the recommendation moved.
Re-verified and unchanged, so that a missing correction is not mistaken for a missing check: Claude Pro $20 ($17 annual), Surfer Discovery $49 and Standard $99, Frase $39 annual and $49 monthly, Grammarly Pro $12, Otter Pro $8.33 annual, Bonsai Essentials $25 ($19 annual), Canva Pro US$180/year, CompanyCam Core $63, Upheal $1/session capped ~$69, Recruit CRM $95 / $135 / $215, GitHub Copilot Pro $10, eRank Basic $5.99, PhotoRoom Pro $12.99 ($7.50 annual), Helium 10 Platinum $99 promotional and $129 list, Jungle Scout $29 and $49, sellerboard $19 ($15 annual), List Perfectly $29 / $49 / $69 / $99+, Virtual Staging AI $16 / $19 / $39 / $79, Spectora $109 and $1,090/year, HomeGauge $89, Jump $100 per advisor, Wealthbox $59 / $75 / $99, AgencyZoom $149 / $199 / $349, Diffit $14.99, Frame.io Pro $15, Marmalead $19 with the $300 lifetime option, DigitalOcean from ~$6. Most months, that list is the whole report.
What counts as a loggable change
- Pick added or removed from any stack, with the head-to-head reasoning.
- Demotion: a pick that got worse (pricing, quality, support) and lost its slot or gained a warning.
- Research Edition → Tested upgrades, when a stack's hands-on cycle lands and editorial ratings become logged results.
- Price corrections: our monthly check catches vendor changes; corrections are noted here, not silently patched.
- Mistakes. When we get one wrong, the correction is logged with the original claim intact. Trust is built in exactly these moments.
Want these as they happen? The weekly email carries every log entry. Most weeks it says "no changes," and that line is the product working.