Methodology
Show the working.
Every directory claims to be objective. Almost none of them will tell you how the ranking is produced or who is paying. Here is ours, in full, so you can decide how much weight to give it.
What the trust score is
Each tool carries a trust score out of 100, built from four things we can actually check: how clearly the product describes what it does, whether pricing is public, whether there is a real company behind it with a track record, and whether the thing does what the marketing says.
It is deliberately not a benchmark score. We do not run our own evaluations, and we are suspicious of directories that publish precise-looking numbers they cannot show you the workings for.
Two ways it gets set, and why that matters
Part of the index is scored by hand. The rest, the tools brought across from our software catalogue, is scored by a formula, from inputs we hold for every one of them: whether real prices are published, how long the company has existed, the user rating discounted by how many reviews it rests on, and whether the entry carries a full description with genuine pros and cons. That is deterministic, so it can be recomputed and argued with.
A derived score runs a little higher than a hand-assigned one for the same tool, because a formula is more generous than an editor. Left alone that would float the imported half of the index to the top of every ranking on an artefact of the arithmetic rather than merit. So the derived scores are mapped onto the distribution of the hand-scored ones: the ordering within the imported set is untouched, but the two populations become directly comparable. Nothing gets a better position for having arrived a different way.
What we publish about models
For language models we list the facts a buyer can verify and act on: context window, input and output price per million tokens, modality, and availability. Those come from each provider’s own published documentation and are dated on the page.
We do not republish leaderboard benchmark figures as though they were ours. Where a number matters to a decision, we would rather point you at the source than launder it through a table here.
How we make money
There are three ways, and all of them are visible:
- Affiliate links. Some outbound links to vendors earn a commission. Every page carrying one says so, and links that earn are marked at the point of click.
- Sponsored placements. Vendors can buy a marked slot. Sponsored units sit outside the ranked list and always carry the label. The rate card is public.
- Advisory. Owners of AI companies sometimes come to us about selling. That work is handled by FIH, our affiliated advisory firm.
What money cannot buy
Position in an organic ranking, a trust score, a review verdict, or the removal of a competitor. Nobody has bought any of those and nobody will not out of virtue, but because an index that can be bought is worthless to readers, and an index that is worthless to readers is worthless to advertisers about a quarter later.
When we get it wrong
Often enough. This is a fast-moving market and some of what is written here will be out of date before you read it. If a price, a limit or a description is wrong, tell us and we will fix it, corrections from vendors about their own products are the fastest route to a better entry.