How we review

Every product is assessed on the same list, because a score is only comparable if the inputs are:

• Price — the published price of each plan, monthly and annual.
• Renewal — what the plan costs after any introductory term, where the vendor publishes it.
• Pricing model — per seat, usage, credits, transactions, tiers, flat rate or one-time, because this decides what a team pays.
• Included usage — seats, storage, projects, credits or transactions covered by the plan.
• Overage — what happens past the included allowance.
• Features gated behind each tier, and which tier a common requirement forces you onto.
• Free plan limits — which limit is reached first.
• Documented support — channels and any published response commitments.
• Public user feedback — recurring themes across independent review platforms.
• Maturity — how long the product has been available and how actively it ships.

Not all evidence is equal, and we treat it in this order. Where two sources disagree, the higher one wins and the conflict is noted on the page.

1. The vendor’s own pricing page — the authority on price, plan names and what a plan includes.
2. The vendor’s documentation and terms — limits, overage rates, cancellation and renewal behaviour.
3. Independent review platforms — G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and similar, used for recurring themes rather than individual anecdotes.
4. Public user feedback — forums and communities, weighted lowest and never quoted as fact.
5. ReviewCost calculations — our own arithmetic on the figures above: cost by team size, annual versus monthly, three-year totals.
6. ReviewCost interpretation — our judgement about who a product suits, clearly framed as opinion.

Each product page lists the pages we read under Sources & verification, with the date each was read. A source is only recorded after the URL was fetched and answered, and a page is only described as “official” when it is on the vendor’s own domain.

• Vendor information — what the vendor publishes. Prices, plan contents, stated limits.
• Independent evidence — what third parties document or consistently report.
• ReviewCost analysis — our calculations and conclusions, which are ours alone and can be wrong.

The cost tables and the calculator on a product page are the third kind. They are built only from stored figures; where a figure is missing the page says so instead of estimating around it. That is why a page will sometimes tell you a team cost cannot be worked out.

• We publish no speed, uptime or performance measurements of our own.
• We do not aggregate reader ratings, so there are no star ratings collected from visitors.
• We do not reproduce a vendor’s marketing claims as findings.
• Scores are our editorial judgement on published evidence, not a laboratory result.

Software pricing changes without notice, so a review is only as good as its last check. Each product page shows when its pricing was last read from the vendor’s page. Pricing is re-checked on a rolling basis and a page falls into an internal queue when its check is more than 90 days old.

When we get something wrong, the corrections policy explains what happens next, and every product page carries a link to report an error.

Every product on the site goes through the same pipeline:

• Research. A live web search gathers the vendor’s current plans and prices, published feature and support documentation, and user feedback from independent review platforms.
• Cost modelling. Pricing plans are recorded individually so the real cost can be compared across a category rather than judged from a headline monthly figure. Plans with no published price — enterprise “contact us” tiers — are excluded rather than guessed at.
• Scoring. The product is scored on six weighted dimensions, described below, so that any two products in a category can be compared on the same basis.
• Publication. The review, the score and the supporting pricing data are published together. Screenshots are captured from the vendor’s live site.

Every product carries a score out of 10, built from six weighted components. The weights are fixed across the whole site — we do not tune them per product or per category.

A score is a comparison aid, not a verdict on whether a product suits you. A tool that scores 8.1 overall may still be the wrong choice if the dimension you care about is the one it scores worst on — which is why we publish the breakdown and not just the total.

Being useful means being clear about the boundary.

• We can establish current published pricing and plan structure, how a product’s cost compares with its category, what features are documented, and which problems recur across large volumes of user reviews.
• We cannot establish benchmark figures we measured ourselves, real uptime, support responsiveness we experienced first-hand, or how a product behaves under your specific workload. Where those matter most to you, treat our review as a starting point and trial the product yourself.

We take no payment for reviews, scores, or placement, and no vendor sees a review before it is published. The site is funded by affiliate commissions and advertising, explained in full in our affiliate disclosure. Commission rates vary between products and do not influence ranking order.

Pricing changes and pages age. We re-check products over time, but if you find something wrong — a stale price, a plan that no longer exists, a claim you think we cannot support — tell us at hello@reviewcost.com. We correct errors of fact promptly and will say on the page when something material has changed.