How we score tools

We don’t publish hands-on “reviews.” Nobody on this site claims to have personally tested every tool — anyone who claims that about 12+ platforms is selling you something. Instead we do structured, repeatable research:

1. What we score (23 criteria, 100 points total)

• Pricing & free plan (25 pts): is there a free tier, what it includes, entry paid price, price per 1,000 contacts/subscribers where relevant, price-change history.
• Creator fit (25 pts): features that matter to solo creators — ease of setup, templates, automation depth, audience migration tools.
• Integrations & ecosystem (15 pts): native integrations, API quality, Zapier/Make coverage.
• Deliverability / reliability (15 pts): published uptime SLAs, documented deliverability practices, status-page history (for email tools); analogous reliability signals per category.
• Support & documentation (10 pts): support channels, response-time policies, docs completeness.
• Company stability (10 pts): funding/ownership, years operating, affiliate-program stability (we track this).

2. Data sources

Vendor pricing pages, official documentation, terms of service, affiliate program pages, and status pages — captured on a dated schedule. We do not scrape or republish vendor marketing copy as our own analysis, and we do not copy user reviews.

3. Update cadence

Pricing data is re-verified monthly; features and integrations quarterly; full re-scores twice a year. Every comparison table shows a “last verified” date. If data is older than 45 days, the table shows “check current price” instead of a number.

4. Limitations — read this

Scores reflect published information, not hands-on use. We can’t measure real-world deliverability or support quality from the outside, and we say so where it matters. Your needs may differ from our rubric’s weights — the tables give you the raw criteria so you can re-weight for yourself. Individual results vary; a tool that scores 92/100 for a newsletter writer may be wrong for a course seller.

5. Corrections

Found stale or wrong data? Contact us — verified corrections are published with a changelog note on the article.