How We Research and Disclose Our Sources

When we started building Plainstack, the first real decision wasn’t a design choice or a tech-stack choice — it was whether to let our tool profiles read like reviews, when they aren’t reviews in the way that word usually implies.

Almost every “best AI tools” site online writes as though someone actually sat down, signed up, and used the product for a while. Sometimes that’s true. Often, reading closely, it isn’t — a lot of that content is a rewritten summary of a vendor’s own marketing page, dressed up with a star rating and a byline that may or may not belong to a real person.

We’re not going to do that. Plainstack’s tool profiles, comparisons, and buying guides are desk research: we read each vendor’s own pricing pages, documentation, and changelogs, and we turn that into plain-language comparisons and real cost math for a specific kind of business — right now, independent consultants and freelancers. We don’t sign up for the products, and we don’t claim to have tested them hands-on, because we haven’t.

Why say this out loud instead of staying quiet about it

The easy version of this decision is to just not mention it — write confidently, use decisive language, and let readers assume whatever they want about how the information was gathered. We think that’s a worse choice than being direct about it, for two reasons.

First, it’s more honest, and honesty is the actual product here, not a nice-to-have. If you’re deciding whether to spend $19 or $49 a month on a tool for your consultancy, you deserve to know whether the source behind that recommendation actually used the product or read its pricing page carefully. We’d rather you trust the second thing we’ve actually done than assume the first thing we haven’t.

Second, we think it’s a genuinely useful signal in a category full of noise. When you see a “Desk-researched, not hands-on tested” notice on a Plainstack page, you know exactly what you’re getting: careful, sourced, dated research, not a first-hand verdict. When we eventually do get hands-on with specific tools, that page will say so, just as plainly.

What this means for how we write

Every price on this site is sourced from a vendor’s own pricing page, dated with an “as of” note, and reviewed on a regular schedule, because vendor pricing changes constantly in this category. Every claim we can’t verify directly, we say so, rather than guessing. And every page is published under a consistent “Plainstack Editorial Team” byline, not an invented individual with a fabricated background, because that would be a worse version of the same problem we’re trying to avoid.

If you want the full detail on how this works, read our Editorial Policy. If you spot something that’s gone stale or wrong, tell us — that’s the other half of doing this honestly.