This page explains exactly how a pick gets onto this site, and — more usefully — what we don’t do. If you’ve read enough buying guides to be suspicious of them, start here.
Last reviewed 14 September 2026. This page changes when our method changes, and the date above moves with it.
We don’t touch the products
No lab, no bench, no unboxing. We don’t buy these things, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Plenty of sites imply hands-on testing they never did; the giveaway is usually the stock photography.
So what is this site for? Narrowing a hundred options down to three defensible ones, and showing the reasoning. That’s a research job, and research is honest work — it just isn’t testing, and calling it testing would be a lie.
If you want somebody who genuinely put the thing on a bench and measured it, Wirecutter and RTINGS do that properly. We’d rather point you there than fake it.
What we actually do
Read the specifications, not the marketing
Every pick starts with the manufacturer’s own published specification — capacity, wattage, weight, warranty term, whatever the category is genuinely shopped on. Those numbers get put side by side. Most product pages are written to make comparison hard, which is the whole reason a comparison table is worth building.
Where a guide prints a spec table, each row links to the manufacturer’s spec page so you can check us.
Read the complaints, not the five-star reviews
The useful reviews are the ones written months after purchase, by people who are annoyed. That’s where the failure modes live: the pump that seizes, the hinge that cracks, the app that gets abandoned. A product with a thousand glowing reviews and a recurring three-star complaint about the same component has told you something specific.
Check the listing is real, and keep checking
Before a product goes in a guide we confirm it’s actually in stock and sold by a first-party seller rather than a marketplace reseller of unknown provenance. Then we re-check every link on the site on a schedule, because listings die quietly — a discontinued product doesn’t announce itself, it just starts pointing at a dead page or a different item under the same URL.
This is the least glamorous part of running the site and probably the most valuable.
Every pick has to have a job
A guide names a small number of picks and each one gets a reason to exist: best for most people, best on a budget, best for a specific awkward situation. If a fifth pick is only there to make the list longer, it doesn’t go in the list.
That also means we’ll tell you when a category isn’t worth buying into at all, or when the cheap option is genuinely fine and the expensive one is selling you a feature you won’t use. A guide that likes everything is useless.
Why you won’t find prices or star ratings here
Amazon prices move daily. A hardcoded figure is wrong within a week, and wrong in a way that looks authoritative, which is worse than saying nothing. Each guide prints a typical range instead — enough to tell you whether you’re in the right aisle, not pretending to be a live quote. Check the current price before you buy. That’s the only number that counts.
Star ratings and review counts get the same treatment. They belong to Amazon, they change constantly, and a stale one reproduced on a third-party site is just misinformation with a decimal point.
Nobody pays to be in a guide
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, so if you buy through a link here we may get a small commission and you pay exactly the same price. The Affiliate Disclosure has the full version.
No brand has ever paid to appear in a guide, to be ranked above another product, or to be described a particular way. That isn’t really a moral stance. A site whose picks are for sale is worth nothing to read, which makes it worth nothing to run.
Commission rates also vary by category, which creates an obvious temptation to steer people toward whatever pays best. We rank on the specifications and the complaint record. If the best pick in a category happens to be the one that earns us least, that’s the one at the top.
Tell us when we’re wrong
We will be, sometimes. A pick gets discontinued, a manufacturer quietly revises a spec, a price range drifts away from reality. If you spot one, get in touch and we’ll fix it — and if the fix changes a recommendation, the guide says so rather than quietly swapping it.