Independence
Verdicts are independent and final at publication. Brands may flag factual errors after a review is live — a wrong spec is a wrong spec, and we want to know. What they may not do is preview a review before publication, approve or veto its verdict, or rewrite a word of it. There is no early-access program, no draft-sharing arrangement, and no rate card for any of this, because none of it is for sale at any price.
Review units
We buy products retail with our own funds whenever possible. When a brand supplies or loans a unit instead, the review discloses it in the tested-by line, on the page, using one of three fixed labels — the full legend is at /how-we-test/. Sending us a product is consent to this policy: gifted or loaned units are disclosed, never guarantee coverage, and never influence outcomes. A free unit buys a disclosure. That’s the entire transaction.
Sponsored content
We don’t currently publish any. If we ever do, it will be labeled Sponsored at the top, will never carry a verdict badge, and will never appear inside a shortlist — the badges and the lists are the product, and they aren’t for rent. Affiliate links are a separate arrangement, disclosed in full at /affiliate-disclosure/.
How a review gets made
Every review follows the same pipeline, in order: real ownership or testing over a stated duration; structured evidence questions answered from that use — performance, durability, honest price math, who should skip it; scoring on the five published criteria; the verdict, decided before anyone checks what the product pays; then drafting, fact-check against the evidence, and publication with dated prices. The order matters — a verdict reached before the money question is the structural reason the money question can’t reach the verdict.
How the words get written
The testing, the photographs, the evidence answers, the scores, and every verdict on this site come from a human who used the product. We use AI assistance in drafting and editing the prose that presents that evidence — the same way publications have always used editors, but faster and with better grammar. No machine has ever chosen a verdict, invented a test result, or scored a product here, and every factual claim in a review traces to the tester’s own answers. We’d rather tell you exactly how the sausage is made than let you wonder.
Bylines
Reviews are published under the byline of Frank Mason, and the testing behind every review is real work by the person behind that byline — durations, provenance, and dated prices are stated on each one, and the full verdict record is public at /author/frankmason/. What we publish under a byline, we can defend line by line.
Corrections and verdict changes
When we get a fact wrong, we correct the page, date the correction, and log it publicly at /corrections/ — and the correction also prints on the page it fixed, so a reader never needs to visit the log to learn about it. When a retest changes a verdict, the old verdict remains visible with a strikethrough and a date, because pretending we always said the new thing would be its own kind of error. Corrections are answered before any other mail we receive.
Freshness
Stale content is updated or unpublished — never left to rot. Prices are re-dated at every content touch, picks are rechecked in our Still Worth It? series, and a discontinued product’s review gets a “no longer sold” notice pointing at the current recommendation rather than quietly ranking on for clicks. An old page wearing a fresh date it didn’t earn is a lie with a timestamp, and the updated stamps on this site only move when content actually changed.
Questions, answered
Can a brand see its review before it publishes?
No — there is no preview program at any price. Brands are welcome to flag factual errors after publication, and genuine errors get corrected, dated, and logged. But the first time a brand reads its verdict is the same moment you do.
Do you accept sponsored posts or paid placements?
Not currently, and if that ever changes the rules are already written: a Sponsored label at the top, no verdict badge, and never inside a shortlist. Pitches offering payment for placement in a shortlist get declined — that’s the one thing on this site that cannot be bought.
Do you use AI to write reviews?
We use AI assistance for drafting and editing prose — never for testing, scoring, or verdicts, which come from a human who used the product, and never as a source of facts, which all trace to the tester’s evidence. We disclose it because the distinction matters: the judgment is human; some of the typing isn’t.
What happens when a verdict changes?
The review is updated with the new verdict, the old one stays visible with a strikethrough and the date it changed, and the change is logged at /corrections/ as a verdict change — the log’s most important entry type. Subscribers hear about it in the weekly email. Verdict history is part of the verdict.