How we evaluate SaaS tools

What we read

The editor reads the vendor's pricing page, its documentation, its changelog or release notes where they exist, and its terms where a fee or limit is defined there. For billing tools that means pages such as stripe.com/pricing, paddle.com/pricing and the webhook references in each vendor's developer docs. For email, analytics and support tools it means the pricing pages and the API or event documentation.

We do not open accounts and run the products. A page therefore never says "we tested" or ranks tools by how they felt to use. What a page can tell you is what the vendor publishes: the price at a given volume, what a plan includes and excludes, which events a webhook sends, and what the free plan allows.

How a price gets onto a page

1. The price is read from the vendor's public pricing page. When the page renders its numbers with JavaScript, the page is fetched as text and as a rendered screenshot, and a number is kept only if the two agree.
2. The figure and a short quotation are stored with the vendor's URL and the date of reading.
3. The page that uses the figure carries the same date and links to the vendor's page next to the number.
4. Where we do arithmetic, such as a fee on a $29 payment or the cost at 50,000 contacts, the inputs are published prices and the sum is shown on the page.

Slider-based vendors are recorded at the volumes their slider displayed on the day. We do not extrapolate between stops or write a per-thousand rate unless the vendor publishes one.

Quote-based vendors

Some vendors, among them several enterprise customer-success and engagement platforms, show no price. Pages about them say "pricing on request (quote-based)" and link the vendor, and compare them on the pricing unit the vendor describes (seats, monthly tracked users, credits) instead of inventing a figure.

Screenshots

Screenshots are captured from the live public page and dated in the caption. They are never edited or composited. If a capture shows a cookie dialog over the prices, a different currency or an error page, the caption says that or the screenshot is left out and the page notes why.

What we do not do

• No star ratings, scores or "editor's choice" badges.
• No performance statistics, recovery percentages or ROI figures unless they link to a real source on the same line.
• No customer stories, quotes or case studies that we cannot link.
• No paid placement in rankings. A recommendation carries its reason, and the cost of following it, on the page.
• No claims about a vendor's hosting region, certifications or data-processing terms unless the vendor's own page says so and we link it.

The facts we state about Sequenzy come from its pricing page and documentation: free up to 2,500 emails, paid plans priced by emails sent with unlimited contacts, listed integrations with Stripe, Paddle and Lemon Squeezy, and dunning emails sent when Stripe reports a failed invoice payment, with a page where the customer updates their card. Payment retries are done by the billing platform, and we make no claim about how many failed payments any email recovers.

Corrections

Vendors change plans without notice. When a reader or the editor finds a number that no longer matches the vendor's page, the vendor's page wins: the figure is replaced, the date on the page moves, and the change is made at the line where the old number stood. Send corrections through the contact page.