every ai tool worth knowing about
and what the licence actually says

most of them are compiled from vendors' marketing copy, which is why they list things that shut down last year and misprice the rest by an order of magnitude. a large part of this directory was written the other way round: we opened the vendor's pricing page and the actual licence file, checked what we found, and left a one-line verdict on the entry. where an entry is just a vendor's own description, the page says so in plain words rather than letting you assume otherwise.

directory listings. a free listing costs nothing and is reviewed by hand; $50 buys a featured slot, which publishes immediately and pins the listing to the top of its category page. there is also advertising, and affiliate links on some outbound vendor links where we may earn a commission. every featured listing is labelled as featured wherever it appears and its outbound links carry rel="sponsored nofollow".

no. a featured slot buys position on a category page and an immediate publish. it does not buy a verdict, it does not change one we have already written, it cannot remove or demote a competitor, and it does not make us research a product we had not got to. if a vendor asks for a verdict to be softened, the answer is no and the verdict stays; if the verdict is factually wrong, we fix it whether or not they pay us anything.

for those entries: the vendor's own pricing page, the actual licence file, and the product documentation, read on a date we recorded rather than taken from a listicle. where a category has credible independent measurement — public leaderboards with large vote pools, published adoption figures — we used it and said so. it does not mean a controlled benchmark, and we do not publish measured figures we did not produce.

often not, and checking is the single most useful habit to copy from this site: open the licence file rather than trusting the launch post. it is common to find downloadable models and tools whose announcements imply permissive terms while the actual licence is non-commercial, caps commercial use above a revenue threshold, restricts competing products, or excludes entire jurisdictions. that is exactly the sort of thing a vendor's own description will not tell you.

yes, and quickly. prices, limits, licence terms and version numbers move fast enough that some of this will be out of date before you read it. corrections are welcome from anyone, including the vendor being written about, and we will fix a factual error faster than we will defend it. what we will not do is change a verdict because someone did not like it, whether or not they are a paying listing.

because a number invites comparison across things that were not measured the same way. an entry either carries a verdict in our own words or it carries the vendor's description and says so. within a category, paid slots come first and the rest are ordered by what readers have upvoted — which is a popularity signal and nothing more.