How We Score AI Tools
Every tool on this site gets a trust score out of 100, built from five dimensions. The rubric is versioned — when weights change, we re-score everything and say so.
The five dimensions
- Company & Identity (20 points) — Is there a registered company? Are the founders public? How old is the domain? Is there verifiable funding or press? Can you actually contact someone?
- Data & Privacy (25 points) — Can you delete your data? Clear GDPR/CCPA commitments, security certifications, and any lawsuits or breaches on record. Whether a tool trains on your data is shown as a direct quote from its own policy — we surface it but don't fold it into the score, because classifying dense legal wording fairly is too error-prone.
- Billing & Subscription (20 points) — Transparent pricing, trial-to-paid behaviour, how hard cancellation really is, whether refunds are honoured, and verified billing complaints.
- Product Reality (20 points) — Whether the free tier is real per published terms, and what independent user reports say about output quality and support. Assessed from public signals, not hands-on use.
- Community Reputation (15 points) — App Store ratings, verified reports from readers, and repeated complaint patterns. Some review platforms block automated collection, so we only count what we can actually verify.
Grades
- A (80–100) — strong trust signals on what we measured
- B (60–79) — generally trustworthy with caveats
- C (40–59) — meaningful concerns; read the review before paying
- D (20–39) — serious concerns
- F (0–19) — avoid
Important: the score is the percentage earned on the dimensions we have actually verified — not all five. Every grade carries an "N/5" coverage chip; a grade based on fewer than 4 of 5 dimensions is provisional and will change as more dimensions are assessed. An "A · 2/5" means "clean on company identity and data practices so far", not "fully vetted".
The evidence rule
A score component does not exist on this site unless it is attached to at least one piece of documented evidence: a policy excerpt, a public source URL, a screenshot, or a record in our reports database. If we have no evidence, the section says "Not yet assessed" — we never fill gaps with guesses.
How we collect evidence
Every score on this site today is collected automatically from public records — company registries and WHOIS, each vendor's own published privacy policy, and App Store data — and refreshed on a schedule. Company identity, data & privacy and community reputation are scored this way.
Billing is scored from each vendor's own published pricing, refund and cancellation terms — read the same conservative way as privacy policies. Every billing point on a tool's page links to a verbatim quote from those documents; if the terms don't state something, we leave it blank rather than guess. This reflects what a company publishes, not a hands-on billing test.
Product reality is the hardest dimension to evidence from public records, so where we can't verify it from published terms or independent reports it stays "Not yet assessed" and the grade stays provisional. We don't hands-on test products — we report only what the public record can verify, and we never claim a result we did not actually document.
Signals we show but don't score
Some checks are useful facts but not part of the 100-point score, so we display them separately on a tool's page: technical signals (valid HTTPS, security headers, mail server, malware blocklists) and an official-app check that flags App Store apps using a tool's name but published by a different developer. A new domain or a missing header doesn't make a tool unsafe — so these inform, but never decide, the grade.
What we exclude
We do not list AI companion/NSFW services, trading or investment bots, or tools that claim to diagnose or prescribe. These categories carry risks our rubric is not designed to measure.
AI assistance disclosure
We use AI to assemble review text strictly from our own structured data — every generated sentence maps back to an evidence record, and the mapping is stored for audit. AI never invents claims, scores, or evidence.