How to Tell If an AI Tool Is Legit: 5 Checks Before You Pay

Every week another AI tool goes viral — and every week people hand over a card number to a website they found yesterday. Before you pay (or upload your voice, your face, or your company documents), run these five checks. They take about ten minutes, and they are the same five dimensions we score on every review on this site.

1. Find out who actually runs it

Scroll to the footer. Is there a real company name, or just a logo and a Discord link? Look for a legal entity (an "Inc.", "Ltd." or "GmbH"), a team page with real people, and an address or registered jurisdiction. Then check how old the domain is — a "trusted by 100,000 teams" claim on a domain registered three months ago is a red flag. You can see the registration date of any domain with a free WHOIS lookup; we do this automatically for every tool we track.

2. Read the privacy policy — just three things

Nobody reads the whole policy. Search the page (Ctrl+F) for three things instead:

• "delete" — can you delete your account and data yourself, or only by emailing support?
• "GDPR" / "California" — does the policy explicitly commit to privacy-law rights, or is it silent?
• "train" — does the company say what it does with your content and whether it is used to improve models?

If a tool has no privacy policy at all, or the link 404s, stop there. That alone fails our data-privacy dimension.

3. Check the billing reality, not the pricing page

The pricing page tells you what they want you to pay. What you need to know is what happens after: does the free trial auto-convert to a paid plan? Is there a refund policy in writing — with a number of days — or just "contact us"? Can you cancel from the dashboard, or do you have to email someone? Search the terms page for "refund" and "renew" before you enter a card.

4. Verify community signals — and watch for copycat apps

Ratings help, but check who you are rating. When we match AI tools to their mobile apps, we routinely find third-party copycat apps using a popular tool's name and logo with a completely different developer behind them. On the App Store, tap the developer name and make sure it matches the company you found in step 1. A 4.8-star rating on an app that is not actually made by the company tells you nothing — except that you might be about to pay the wrong people.

5. Assume the rules will change — watch for it

The policy you accept today is not the policy you will be under next year. Privacy terms, training clauses and refund rules change quietly. We snapshot the policies of every tool we track and flag material changes on our Alerts page, so you do not have to re-read terms every month.

Ten minutes, or ten seconds

That is the full checklist: who runs it, what happens to your data, what happens to your money, whether the community signals are real, and whether the rules are stable. It is exactly how our scoring methodology works — every grade on this site is these five dimensions, backed by documented evidence.

And if you want the ten-second version: look up the tool here. If we track it, you will see what we found. If we do not track it yet, your lookup queues it for review.